


The Red Thread

by Dame_Lazarus



Category: Dark (TV 2017), Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death Fix, Deus ex machina (literally), F/F, F/M, Family Reunions, Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Not A Fix-It, Not a Crossover, POV Jaime Lannister, Post-Canon, Season/Series 08, Time Travel, canon-typical incest, decidedly a weird fic, fluff interludes, fusion fic, future fic but also past fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 38,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21796834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dame_Lazarus/pseuds/Dame_Lazarus
Summary: After the Battle of King’s Landing, Jaime Lannister expects to die. Instead, he finds himself on a quest entirely not of his own making, twenty-one years in the future.[“There are so many time travel fix-it fics—it’s like a season ofDarkin here,” the fan mused to herself, and within her, the author woke, an evil laugh bubbling forth from her lips...]Game of Thronespost-season 8, with a plot inspired byDark(Netflix). GoT show canon, with a smattering of bookworld lore. Not a crossover.Complete.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister & Bran Stark, Jaime Lannister & Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 108
Kudos: 159





	1. The Hero

**Author's Note:**

> Season 8 got me so riled up that I wrote this, my first posted fanfic since high school (SEVENTEEN years)! Thanks to the folks on r/freefolk and r/jaimebrienne for bringing this old lady back from the dead.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “But you are asking the wrong question. The question is not where. It is _when_.”

Death hits Jaime Lannister like a ton of bricks.

All he sees next is darkness. He can’t move, or doesn’t want to; his limbs are heavy, but everything else in him feels light, floating. He wants to sleep, embrace the softness within him, so he does. He dreams of fire; of screaming and sobbing and a woman he loves trembling in his arms; of falling rocks and dripping blood. He dreams of the clash of shields and curt orders barked out above him in a language he doesn’t speak.

It is still dark when he opens his eyes again. But there is also light, above him: tiny pricks of it fading in and out. Stars.

He knows now that he is alive.

He crawls out from under rocks, and then over them. He does not think; he just moves. He tries to pull Cersei with him but it is no use. She is unyielding, as she has always been. He leaves her with the crown still skewed on her head. He will come back to get her, he reasons, when he can, because that’s what he always does. For now, he needs to get away.

Away—from the way he came, from the door he was supposed to use, now blocked with stone. So he takes a third way, another opening, letting the rocks on the ground dig into his ribs and roll into him as he moves and moves. He crawls into darkness and crawls until his arms ache and he feels that he cannot crawl any further. Then, ahead: he sees stars. So he keeps going.

A blast of cool air hits him as he reaches the mouth of the tunnel, and he sinks face first onto the sand in exhaustion and gratitude. That’s when two arms grip him. They are strong and firm, though he supposes that he, twice stabbed and many times over crushed by a castle, would feel weak in almost anyone’s arms.

“I have been waiting for you, Ser Jaime,” the person says, lifting him from the ground. A woman, with long dark hair, dressed all in flowing red.

Her voice is deep and lilting and calm. “Come now. The night is dark, and full of terrors.”

* * *

  
Time after that moment passes in a haze. He drifts, and hopes that he will just die, as intended. But he doesn’t. He wakes and sees stars above him, moving. A hand touches his shoulder, and he drifts again.

When he next opens his eyes, he finds himself finally indoors, under a roof that is blessedly not caving in. The room is uncomfortably warm, reminding him with a sickening jolt of another room that was uncomfortably warm, once. He pushes that aside, hastily, sloppily, and raises himself up on the bed. His limbs creak and crack. Disuse, he thinks, or irreparable injury, or both. How long has he been sleeping?

He doesn’t need to wonder much longer. A woman with dark hair dressed all in red glides into the room. She brings him a tray of meat and cheese and fruit—more decadent than he’s had in ages. As she draws closer, he notices that she’s not the same one as before; she’s smaller and darker-skinned, though she is disconcertedly similar in every other way.

“Do eat, Ser Jaime,” she says with a mysterious smile. “You’ll need your strength for the trials ahead.”

“Trials?” he laughs. There cannot possibly be more in store for him. “Where am I? And who are you?”

“You are on the Isle of Fire, as our guest.” She sits on the edge of the bed primly but with assurance and a proud, straight back. “We are the Order of the Red. Do not worry—we serve only the Lord of Light, not any queens or kings.”

The Isle of Fire, he muses, trying not to think of queens just now. He didn’t pay very close attention in his Essos geography lessons, but that doesn’t ring even the slightest of bells. He swallows, trying not to think of bells just now either.

“You wouldn’t have heard of it,” the woman in red tells him, as if he had spoken aloud. “It is new; only five and ten years old.” She smiles again. The expression is starting to unnerve him—it is so calm and confident in a time when he feels neither. “But you are asking the wrong question. The question is not where. It is _when_.”

With that she stands and bows. “You should eat. The night is dark and full of terrors.”

* * *

_When._ He turns the word over in his mind. It clatters around and the sound of it crowds out bells and queens and warm bedroom fires. He finally has a chance to ask someone _when_ he is when a pair of different women in red come later in the day to bathe him and change the bandages on his various wounds, which, he’s noticed, barely hurt now. He refuses to believe it was magic. His right wrist still ends abruptly in a tangle of bone.

The women eye him patiently. “It _is_ magic. Granted to us by the Lord of Light,” one says.

“And to answer your question,” the other continues, pouring water over his head, “it has been some time since the Dragon Queen attacked your city. One and twenty years.”

“I’ve been here for twenty years?!” He nearly knocks the woman over as he spins in the tub to face her. She barely flinches—just laughs.

“No, Ser Jaime. You’ve only been with us for two moons. The Lord of Light brought you to us. He brought you to our time from yours, because you are destined.”

The other woman leans over. “We have seen it in the flames. You will be the one to save the Prince Who Was Promised, and help him lead us into the light.”

The Prince Who Was Promised. He vaguely remembers Rhaegar going on about that, though he couldn’t remember if he himself was supposed to be the prince in question or his son was. No matter; they were both dead decades now—nearly a half-century, apparently—and beyond his saving.

“I don’t know if you have heard,” he says, “but I don’t have the best record of protecting royals of any kind.” It is a bitter understatement. Four kings, one queen, and several princes and princesses dead on his watch. Only the mad would charge him with protecting more. Then again. The two women share a knowing look.

Once again, Jaime would much prefer to just have died.

He estimates over the weeks that follow that there are dozens of cryptic red women here. He hardly sees the same one twice. They are all singularly focused on preparing him for their quest. They feed him and bathe him and massage his muscles so he can stand and walk and lift. They anoint him with oils and pray over him, a bright fire blazing. He tries not to burst into laughter while they are doing this. If Tyrion could see him now. The Hero; the Destined; the last hope of the Order of the Red. _I heard Stannis burned people in sacrifice to his god_ , he hears him point out glibly. _Maybe they are trying to make sure you give off nice odors and roast evenly._ He pushes that thought aside, too. At some point he will have to collect all these buried horrors and look at them. Maybe after his quest. Whatever that is. He hopes they give him a sword, at least.

They answer him in brief when he presses them for details of what’s occurred since the battle that for him was only just a little while ago. The Dragon Queen is dead. Jon Snow stabbed her in the heart in the throne room, and got exiled to the Wall. The North remains independent. A greenseer sits on the throne, King Brandon Stark. They disapprove of this development in particular; he serves the old gods, even after the Lord of Light served him in the battle against the dead. And they also give him the news he most wants to know: his brother lives, landing on his feet as Hand once again; his sister is dead, her body burned and his believed so, as well. He is relieved; it’s the best possible outcome for them all.

“And your knight,” one woman tells him, with an irritatingly knowing smile, “commands the White Sword Tower.” All the rest of them seem to know which knight she means. He didn’t even ask them about her. He pushes down the creeping guilt and panic at the word _your,_ but lets himself feel his pride for her, at least. She’ll be excellent. Or has been. Is being.

Their eagerness to heal him is worrying. What will they want in return? Once he gets his strength back, he vows, he has to find a way out of here and away from these mad women before he finds out.

* * *

One night he is shaken awake. The fire burns low and the light of the small hours around him is soft and blue. To his left stands a woman in red, another new one. This one is older; her long hair is silver with age. Something else is different about her, too: her face is not knowing, or serene, or assured. In the light of the candle she holds, she looks harried and concerned. “Do not be alarmed,” she says, “but we have not much time.”

“Is it time for my quest already?” he asks, sitting up in his bed. He had expected more fanfare, maybe a ritual burning of one of the spare priestesses.

She shakes her head. “What they seek is not right,” she says. “You mustn’t stay here.”

“Where else do I have to go?” She gives him a long look, full of indecipherable meaning. Not so different from the others, after all. He wonders what she saw in her fire.

“Off this island, and far away from them,” she finally says. “Come, Ser Jaime. For the night is dark and—“

“Yes, yes, I’m aware,” he replies, standing and reaching for his clothes. He doesn’t trust her, either, but he likes the sound of _far away from them_. “Lead the way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I’ve violated like a sacred norm by updating this a bunch o’ times after posting. But what is the point of self-publishing when you  
> cannot enjoy the perks?


	2. The Maiden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Follow the red thread,” she advises, whatever in seven hells that means.

The old woman leads him through an overgrown and rocky path to a beach. All this time, the sea was just a short distance away. A small white skiff waits for them there, anchored in the shallows, rocking gently in the waves. He stares at it for a long while. Perhaps he _is_ dead, he thinks. It would explain how his failures seem to be waiting for him and staring at him at every turn.

“You could not save your queen,” the woman says. “But you did save your people. Once from fire, and once from ice.”

“If you don’t save the ones you love most, does any of it all really matter?” he asks. She ignores him.

“Come,” she says instead, moving toward the boat. He climbs in, resigned, behind her.

Neither of them row the boat. It moves of its own accord, gliding through the sea like a flat stone skipped across a river from his childhood. It occurs to him now that he had no plan on how to actually get Cersei across the Narrow Sea. Would he try to row them with only one good arm? Would _she_ volunteer to take a turn? Both ideas are equally laughable.

“You needn’t despair,” the woman says, keeping her gaze across the water, ahead. Her long gray hair streaks behind her in the breeze. “You will see her face again, the woman you love, before you leave this earth.”

He cannot wait to begin his quest, he decides. He doesn’t even care what it is, as long as it doesn’t involve uncomfortable and unfathomable prophecies and conversations where he doesn’t say anything out loud. He would even be happy to be thrown from his boat to begin it swimming, alone.

* * *

Sooner than he expects, the boat reaches the shore. The sun is blazing overhead; he even sweats through his shirt despite the thin spray of seawater that has draped them through their journey. They disembark not on a secluded stony beach, or a secret cove, but at a bustling pier at the mouth of a twisted, towering city of buildings teetering on the edge of a slick black cliff. He’d watched it approach them on the horizon with a mix of hope and dread.

No one is surprised to see them. They are just another odd pair in an odd metropolis. They walk across the docks, past merchants’ stalls and the grills of street food vendors. His mouth waters. After weeks of regular meals, he’s grown unused to hunger.

The old woman leads him briskly from the shore and up a series of winding, narrow, climbing streets. At least one of them knows where they are going. Then, at the intersection of equally crowded small roadways, she stops. He can see men stumbling across the stone and half-undressed women laughing, heads tipped back. Laughter and muffled shouts ring out. He knows exactly the sort of street this is. The woman points across the way to a rather dull building, all unpainted dark wood in its facade, at the corner.

“This is where I leave you,” she says.

“What?”

She points up. He looks, but it’s just the sky. “Follow the red thread,” she advises, whatever in seven hells that means.

She shoves him forward to the building. He sighs, but he walks forward. Where else does he have to go? When he reaches the door, he turns to get one last clue from the old woman, but she is already gone.

The building is a whorehouse like any other. He’s fished his men and his brother out of enough to know without being a patron himself. The entryway is a tight hallway, hewn of dark wood just like the rest of it. It’s dimly lit; he looks up and sees a series of small lanterns hung from the low ceiling, strung together with a thin red rope.

_Follow the red thread._

So he does, walking straight down the hall to where the rope must begin.

From almost nowhere, to his left, a stout dark-skinned woman appears. She smiles and asks him a question in a language he doesn’t quite understand. Probably Valyrian. He never really got to those lessons in his youth; he could barely master reading and writing in his own tongue as it was.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I have no idea what you are saying.”

She breaks into an even bigger smile. “Ah! Westerosi! I know perfect for you. Follow.”

She turns to the door at the end of the hallway, and gestures to him to join her inside.

In the surprisingly large room, across from a fireplace and a bed shrouded in an assortment of worn scarves, a girl with long, flowing blonde hair scrambles to attention. She meets his eye neutrally, but he almost thinks he sees her push back a spark of recognition. His mouth runs dry and his heart pounds. He’d know her anywhere: the soft curve of her neck, the gentle smile tugging at her lips, the rosy glow of her cheeks.

Like a ghost from his darkest guilty place, like his memory made flesh, the Cersei of his youth stands before him, lithe and golden.

“You like?” the stout dark woman asks gleefully. “Whore, with face of queen!”

He turns to her, grabbing her by the front of her shirt so briskly that he lifts her slightly from the ground. “What is this?” he hisses. “Who are you?”

The smile dissolves from the woman’s face into a stern frown. He hears a familiar sound, the sliding of metal, and before there is time to truly understand what is happening, a searing pain spreads in his leg just underneath the knee. He looks down to see a dagger pushed into the fleshy part of the underside of his thigh, there, blood spreading into his breeches.

He reacts. It is instinct. He pulls the dagger from his body and slices it deep across the woman’s throat. She crumples, gasping, blood running through her fingers as she falls to the ground.

“You didn’t need to do that,” a voice says, as the stout woman stills on the ground and silence returns to the room. The dagger drops from his hand. He looks over to the fire, to the young and familiar girl standing there. Her face, he knows, but the voice is new. This is not Cersei. This is an entirely different person.

“You didn’t need to do that,” she says again, staring at him and the dead woman still bleeding onto the worn, once-fine rugs on the floor in front of them. “She brings every middle-age Westerosi man in here. She didn’t know who you were.”

“And you do?” He is having trouble standing now, the adrenaline leaving his body cold and shaking. She comes to his side then, holds him up under one arm to keep him upright.

“Yes,” she says, staring at him with a furrowed brow. Up close, he feels stupid for thinking she might be his sister; she is taller, and thinner, and her jaw more angular. “I recognize your face, for the same reason you do mine. We’re family.” He can’t think of what to say next, but he doesn’t need to. She guides him to sit on the bed and then turns to a small cabinet nearby.

“Let me patch you up,” she says resolutely. “Then you’re going to get me out of here.”

* * *

For a girl in a pleasure house, she has a lot of medicinal supplies at her disposal. She staunches the bleeding in his leg, numbs the skin with some ointment and stitches the wound closed. It’s thankfully not deep, but it is wide. He watches curiously as she hurriedly packs bottle after bottle from the cabinet into a makeshift sack.

“Not everyone wants to just _fuck_ the queen,” she says, almost as an explanation. He feels his stomach drop at that; whoever this girl is, she doesn’t deserve the rage of the veterans of his family’s wars wrought on her skin.

He stands then, wincing, and retrieves the dagger from the ground where it fell just moments before. He _will_ get her out of here. She’s not a prince, but she needs saving all the same. _In the name of the mother, I charge you,_ he remembers.

They climb over the dark woman’s body and slip the door closed behind them. Soon, someone will find all this mess, but in this brief window of time, they are just a man and his bought woman, stumbling in the dark hallways towards their predictable exchange. She grasps his arm and pulls him through a few more equally dark and even more poorly lit passageways to another entrance into a cluttered alleyway strewn with waste.

“I think we can take a street over there.” She points to an opening between two buildings at their left that he would never have noticed otherwise.

“It doesn’t really seem like you needed my help to rescue you,” he says.

She pulls useless right arm at the elbow and directs them toward the street in question. “I could hardly manage to slit anyone’s throat before they could take me down.”

He laughs then, but not out of mirth. “Maybe you just haven’t tried.” She doesn’t respond, just keeps walking at an increasingly fast pace up another narrow street, indistinguishable from all the others.

“So you’re a Lannister,” he says, trying for a new subject. When you have no idea what’s going on, there are seemingly endless conversation topics to choose from. “How did you end up in a whorehouse in...whatever thrice-damned city this is?”

“I could ask you the same,” she replies. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“A red witch dropped me off out front and said I have a quest from the Lord of Light.” She glances his way and raises her eyebrow, looking so utterly like his sister in the moment that he stops walking. “Not what you were expecting to hear?”

She grabs his arm and pulls him abruptly forward again. “We can’t just _stop_ yet,” she whispers. “We haven’t gotten far enough away.”

They veer off on another turn, moving higher up into the city.

“Dianna Hill,” she finally says. “I was kidnapped on the road some moons ago, back home, and sold off to Glenara—that’s the woman you killed—and brought here, to Volantis.” Volantis. He’s never been, or even given it much thought, but at least it was a familiar place, in a way. It brings sureness to his feet.

“Hill,” he muses. “A bastard of the Westerlands, then? Who’s your father? There can’t be many Lannisters sowing their seed over there. My cousin Tyrek? Or are you his sister’s...what was her name...”

”I was raised at court,” she says. “A ward of my natural father. The Hand of the King.”

At that, he stops again. “Tyrion? Tyrion is your father?”

“That’s the rumor, anyway,” she replies, pulling him forward again. “I assume that it’s true. It’s never been a subject of discussion between us.”

“But who is your mother?” His niece. It’s a strange thought. He’s never truly had one.

She sighs, heavily. “Dead, in childbirth. A kitchen girl. Or, at least, at the time.” Ah. He never expected Tyrion to be this careless, but he’d smuggled a lover into the Red Keep before, and you can’t avoid missteps forever. He knows that all too well.

“He’s probably very worried about you, if you just vanished on the road. He’s probably got soldiers combing the lands.”

She smiles ruefully, looks down at the ground as she pushes ahead. “And the king is a greenseer. Between the two of them, they should have found me before I even got put on that ship. But—here I am. Being rescued by my dead uncle after ages waiting for them in vain. Perhaps they aren’t as worried as you seem to think.” He realizes, for the first time, that it couldn’t have been easy, looking as she does in a court only recently wrenched from his sister’s reign. She probably felt more like a complication and a burden than not.

They’ve finally come to the mouth of a wide street, crowded again with merchants and many, many people, scurrying about their business. A few steps forward and they’d just be two more faces in a sea of unfamiliar people tending to their own needs. She grabs his hand again as they move into the crowd and drift along down the street, as if floating along with the restless current of a stream. Being rescued, she had said. Truly, he wasn’t so sure of who was rescuing whom, at this point.

* * *

Dianna finally determines they are far enough away from the site of their murder and escape, respectively, and so she leads them into a small inn tucked just off the main road. She has some coins tucked into her satchel—clever girl, but he perhaps should expect nothing less from Tyrion’s daughter—and she gets them a room for the night. He’s glad of it; his leg aches fiercely after trudging across the city with a fresh wound.

The sun begins to set, and so they settle down with bread and a pungent soft cheese upstairs with the door barred. He knows Dianna doesn’t want to linger in the open, just in case.

“How is it that you recognize me?” he asks her, after swallowing some of a clear, sweet drink she’d poured him that was definitely not water but also not wine, either.

“The king,” she replies. “He’s been working on an illustrated history of Westeros for many years, based on what he sees from the past. Tyrion showed me some of the drawings of our family. Your parents. His siblings.” She bites off a piece of bread and chews thoughtfully, looking him over. “The drawings are actually quite accurate. The last one of you is when you knighted Ser Brienne. You look much the same, though perhaps in a better mood.”

He swallows again, though nothing is in his mouth, this time. “You know her well?”

Dianna smiles, briefly, the first one he’s seen. “Quite,” she says. “She was there when I was born, in the Red Keep. Swore to my mother as she died that she’d look after me. And she did. She had no mother of her own, either.”

He nods. It sounds like her. Brienne and her vows.

“They named you Hill, though,” he says finally, desperate to talk of something else. She chuckles then.

“I suppose Tyrion didn’t want people gossiping about my parentage. Not that they didn’t find a way to, anyway.” She stands from the small table in the room and brushes the crumbs off her lap.

“Let’s sleep,” she says. “We’ll have an early start. And”—she glances at the bed—“don’t be chivalrous. Take the bed. I’m not the one who got stabbed today.”

He wants to argue, but she’s already grabbed a pillow from the head of the bed and settled down on the rug across from the fireplace before he can.

Like everything else on this journey, he supposes, he will just have to float along and trust that the current will wash him up somewhere in one piece. When you’ve already chosen to face death, he has learned, you come to feel that destinations matter less than they once did.


	3. The Voyage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When he catches up, and stands beside her, he finally sees what caught her attention. At the bottom of a small valley, one quite free of dead birds, stand three women in flowing red dresses, shoulder to shoulder. They share identical expressions of serene bemusement.
> 
> “Oh great, it’s this lot,” he mutters. “Seven blessings!” he calls down to them, waving. Dianna shoots him an incredulous glance. 
> 
> “Greetings, Kingslayer,” the middle one retorts coolly.

For the first time in a long while, Jaime’s night is dark, but not full of terrors. Neither is his morning. Although Dianna all but dragged him from the bed, and made sure he stayed that way by banging about the room and humming loudly, he’s never been so excited to feed and dress himself. 

“You said you were taken on the road,” he begins, lacing up his boots. There is still a lot to ask her. Everything that had happened in the past twenty-so years, for instance.

“I was traveling with the Baratheons,” she says. “Lord Gendry’s wife died in childbirth and it was arranged for me to join their household to help with the children.” And fall into the arms of a grieving lord with a soft spot for highborn bastards at the same time, he thought wryly. Tyrion would keep the favor of the Stormlands and get a litter of grandchildren who would remember the Lannister name fondly. Tywin’s son in the end. At least Lord Gendry made it through all right. Jaime had privately thought that odds were higher that he’d be run through by angry bannermen incensed that their new lord was a blacksmith who couldn’t read.

“And? Were you on a horse? Was it an army who seized you or just a bunch assholes out for gold? Did Lord Gendry fight for your honor?”

“There will be plenty more time to regale you with tales of me being dragged around against my will while we’re on the ship to Westeros,” she says, one hand on the doorknob, her voice steely and stern. “I hear you might have some of your ow—“

“Who said we were going to go to Westeros?” He can feel his panic rising. He had thought it was a possibility, back when they were talking about princes, because there were only so many places you could find them, but to be confronted with it now, looming in front of him, is a fresh terror.

“Where else would we go?” Dianna is looking at him the way he probably had been looking at the gaggle of red women back on the Isle of Fire. “My family might not be desperate to get me back, but it’s my home. I certainly don’t want to stay here.”

He doesn’t want her to stay here either, in a place where someone will buy her and call her the whore with the face of a queen. He’d seen the tattoo on her neck, a teardrop the size of a pearl, below her ear; she had said the slavers put it there instead so as not to mar their main selling point, when he noticed it as they broke their fast. Still, there were advantages to being anonymous and not in Westeros. No one was looking for a dead man, but in Westeros, a few people might recognize him. Like the king. And the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Could you be executed for attempted kingslaying, retroactively?

He breathes deeply to slow his thoughts. Dianna just stares at him, saying nothing, frowning.

“I’ll escort you to a ship bound for Westeros,” he finally says. “But I’m not going back there.”

She doesn’t look happy with this, but she leads the way down the stairs all the same.

* * *

  
They are back stumbling through narrow streets. He feels eyes on him everywhere. Maybe, though, they’re on the girl on his arm. She’s tied her hair up from her face, and her tattoo is clearly visible. She’s still in her dress from the whorehouse, too, a loose deep-red thing revealing far too much of her breasts. He wishes for a cloak, despite the unbearably hot weather, so he could shield her from all this.

Dianna knows her way around Volantis curiously well, even though by her telling she has spent the last many months locked away in a whorehouse. When he points this out to her, she just shakes her head. “To tell the truth, I’ve not a clue where we’re going. You’re just safer looking like you have a purpose. I’m trying to find us a vantage point so we can see which way the sea is.” They turn a corner then, and narrowly miss running intoa litter carried aloft by four oiled and tattooed men. He throws them both back into a stone wall, his arm barring Dianna from moving forward so that the group could pass. So much for safer.

Eventually, many unpredictable streets later, she does spot the sea, and triumphantly drags him through a maze of dirty streets so fast he’s practically jogging at the end. They wind up at a different set of docks from before; these merchants aren’t hocking delicious food, but an assortment of very foul-smelling dead fish. Dianna scans the ships ahead, then darts to the right, dragging him again by the elbow behind. She speaks with a blue-haired man in front of one ship in fast Valyrian, then fishes some coins out of her bag, holding up two fingers.

“No,” he tells her. “I said I’d take you to a ship, not get on one with you.”

“You said you’d take me to a ship bound for Westeros,” she corrects him. “This one is only going to Lys.”

She’s got him there.

* * *

  
In his youth, he imagined that spices would be the best cargo to sail off with, if he ever found himself in a position to do so: a voyage wrapped in resplendent bakeries, in mugs of hot mulled wine, in the hallways near the kitchens after a great feast. The reality, on their ship bound for Lys, disappoints; a cloying abundance of cinnamon makes him want to vomit, and when he gets a waft of it mixed with winds carrying the scents of saffron and pungent Valyrian sage, it is even worse.

Consequently, they spend as much of the first four days on board the boat above deck, trying to position themselves to get a face full of sea wind. Jaime stakes out a corner near the bow for them and makes sure his dagger is visibly fastened to his belt; Dianna is used to shrugging off the eyes of others but he can see the crewmen’s stares getting bolder the farther they are from the shore, and he doesn’t like it. He didn’t sleep at all the first night in the hold thinking about those stares.

“You never did tell me the rest of your story,” he prods on that fourth afternoon. Dianna is sewing herself a less revealing top for the dress out of a piece of cloth that she traded for a hangover tonic mixed from her satchel apothecary with one of the merchants on board, and she doesn’t answer him right away. It occurs to him belatedly that she perhaps does not want to revisit the moment. He of all people should have guessed; it took him twenty years to speak of what happens to Aerys, and he still couldn’t bear even to think of racing through the streets of King’s Landing, a dragon soaring overhead.

“There isn’t much to tell. We were traveling to visit the late lady’s family, and a group of bandits ambushed us. The men we had with us were busy protecting the children and getting away. I thought they might kill me until a woman in the group pointed out how much I’d fetch on the slave market. And then I ended up here.” She puts down her needlework to stare out to the sea. “It’s funny. I had years of combat training as a child—I was never much good at it, weak arms, always getting distracted—and yet nothing came to me. I just let them grab me and drag me through the dirt, screaming.”

Bastard girls lined up in a palace courtyard, swinging swords with the Master of Arms and dreaming of becoming the next lady knight. He fills his mind with the picture to cover up another that he doesn’t want: Dianna with his sister’s face, carried off against her will.

“We can’t all be good at everything,” he says finally. “You should hear my Valyrian. That’s why we have scholars and we have knights. You should get yourself a hedge knight, once you’re back home, to watch your back.”

She smiles to herself and picks her needle back up. Perhaps it’s just the light, but he thinks he sees a soft blush creep up her neck.

He grins. She’s been so self-assured that he’s thrilled to see a glimpse of the girl she really is, underneath. “Or, perhaps you have someone in mind? Podrick Payne? He’s got to be a knight by now.”

She screws up her face as though she’d bitten in to a fresh lemon. “Ser Podrick? He’s nearly forty years old! He could be my father.” A world where Podrick Payne is too old to be fancied by young maidens. Gods, he himself was only a few years past forty now, and that was just in his own time. Here he would be over sixty, practically one hand on the arm of the the Stranger.

“But you do have someone in mind,” he counters.

She purses her lips. “Enough about me, uncle,” she says. “What is it that you’ve been doing, all this time in Essos?”

“I told you,” he replies. “A tribe of red priestesses sent me on a quest. They saved me and then abandoned me in Volantis to find some prince for them.”

“Right,” she says. “I guess you don’t really have to say.”

He just sighs and ends the conversation with perturbed silence. He’d even left the most unbelievable part of the story out, and it still sounded fanciful. He should just start making things up.

* * *

On the fifth day at sea, they stay belowdecks amongst the sacks of cinnamon. A storm crept up on them in the small hours of the morning, and by midday, the rain and wind has only grown more wild. The ship shakes so violently that Dianna stabs herself in the hand with the needle multiple times and gives up on her project altogether.

A man with a wheel tattoo on his cheek waddles into their corner of the hold. Water squishes inside his boots. “You,” he says, pointing at Jaime. “All men to sails.” Another shameful gap in his knowledge. There were whole days of his youth devoted to the workings of ships where all he could recall was the story of Ser Duncan that he’d been thinking about instead. He remembers leaving and wondering, _when am I ever going to need to know how to sail a ship anyway._

He leaves Dianna with the dagger and follows the man above deck.

The wind overpowers him easily. He can barely stand. The rain hits so solidly that it’s like swimming under a waterfall: brief minutes where all five of his senses can only feel the pounding rush of water to the exclusion of all else. A drenched man with an air of authority curses at the wheel tattoo man when he catches sight of them and gestures angrily at his right arm. 

“Surely I can at least hold something for you?” He shouts at him.

The man waves him off. “Just go back down,” he shouts back, surprisingly, in his own language. “Storm will pass soon. Always one like this on spice route to Westeros.”

“Westeros?” he shouts back. But the two men are already walking away, and his question disappears into the wind.

Jaime staggers back to the hold, inching along the ship’s walls until he reaches the ladder to climb down. His own sodden footsteps squelch as, breathing hard, he passes a row of staring, wrinkly merchants on his way to Dianna.

She looks up at him when he stops before her, quizzically. “Back so soon?”

He holds up his right arm, water sloughing off his soaked shirt and puddling onto the floor. She nods and moves over so he can sit down. But Jaime just stands motionless, staring down.

“It seems,” he says finally, “that this ship is going to Westeros.”

She sighs. “Oh, don’t be mad. I could hardly travel all this way by myself. Look at me! And whatever you might say, I can’t imagine there is anything really left for you in Essos.” _It’s not what is there, so much as what is not there_ , he thinks, his anger swelling and mixing with the panic that has been lingering behind in his chest.

“You didn’t have to lie! You could have asked for my help,’” he hisses. “Seven hells.”

“You didn’t give me much of a choice! When I said Westeros, you looked like I was reading a proclamation of your execution. There’s no reasoning with that. You knew what I was facing and you still looked like that. The king probably knows exactly where you are, anyway! He’s probably watching us right now and—“

She doesn’t have time to finish her tirade, because she is interrupted by a loud thud and the sounds of splintering wood. The ship shudders and slowly begins to tilt. Jaime stumbles to his knees and when he braces himself on the floor, he finds his hand in a puddle of water, greater than the one he could have left just with his dripping clothes. 

Dianna meets his eye with panic and stands, lifting her damp skirts with one hand and offering another to help him up. Behind them, the merchants scramble as more water accumulates, lifting bags of spices on their shoulders and yelling in several languages. They race for the ladder to the deck all in one great mass; Jaime takes an elbow to the face before he is able to knock his way to the front and pull Dianna up the rungs to the surface behind him.

The ship is moored along a craggy coast, the bow crushed painfully on a sharp boulder. They list badly to the right, and with each unrelenting gust of rain-soaked wind, the ruins of the rig creak ominously.

All around, men are heaving bags of cargo onto the beach. Some of the spices have already been lost to the rain and the ocean; there is the scent of a terrible, medicinal soup filling the air.

“Come on,” Dianna shouts, grabbing his arm. She climbs onto a railing, looking down, and before he can stop her, she leaps out into the water. It’s not far down; she fumbles to all fours in the waves, but then turns to beckon him down frantically.

She doesn’t ask for his help this time, either, but he knows she needs it, so he jumps too.

They trudge through the shallows to the beach. It is not sandy. When he bumped to the bottom, his knees and elbows collided hard with a tangle of smooth, hard stones. He can feel some of the stitches in his leg pulling loose.

Beside him, he hears the clinking of glass. It seems Dianna insisted on dragging her damned satchel with her off the ship, and now the contents of the sodden bag slung across her chest are reduced to a pile of broken bottles.

Overhead, thunder rolls, a series of low, angry shouts. The merchants have descended into pandemonium. One crew member is holding two of them off one another; a second is a few lengths away with a knife to his throat.

“We need to get away from here,” he murmurs to Dianna. “Where’s the dagger?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t have time to grab it. I lost my shirt, too.”

“Yes, because those things are the same,” he snaps, pulling her in the opposite direction of the chaos. “I suppose if someone attacks us I’ll fend them off with some of the shards of glass in your bag.”

“You’re acting like this is all my fault,” she says.

“Well, to be honest,” he says, searching the cliffs above them for a way off the beach, “it partly is.”

He finds a break in the reddish cliff line and leads them to it. His suspicions are correct: a steep, worn path cuts through the stone and underbrush to the high ground at the top. A worn path meant that there was likely some civilization somewhere around here; the thought is comforting. Maybe they’ll have some dry buildings and some clothes that don’t smell like they were dipped in sagewater. The rain isn’t coming down as hard but it still drizzles, slowly and torturously.

All comfort leaves him, though, when they reach the top of the cliff. There is a sparse grassy clearing there, and no sign of other people in any direction. There are, however, birds.

Dead birds, to be precise. Hundreds of them. Gulls, crows, exotic small yellow birds with plumes of white feathers on their foreheads. Perhaps the storm caused them to die, he thinks, though he’s never heard of any such thing before.

“Maybe we should go back to the beach,” Dianna says, breaking their silence.

“You have no sense of what’s dangerous and what’s not. A few dead birds is nothing compared to a bunch of frenzied Volantene merchants.” He begins to walk forward, picking his way around tiny bird corpses left and right. He’s gone a few paces when he realizes she hasn’t come with him. He turns back and sees her still on the edge of the cliff, now turned to glance back down to the place from which they came.

“Perhaps, though, they’ll have a plan to fix the ship and keep sailing,” she says, almost pleading.

He strides back toward her in two wide steps. A few birds crunch sickeningly under his feet. Now his face is just inches from hers; he grips her shoulder with his left hand and forces her to look at him. “You are the one who brought me along because you didn’t want to do this voyage by yourself. Do you want to stick with me? Because you’re welcome to go back and figure it out on your own.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said. “You wouldn’t just leave your own kin like that. I’ve heard the stories; even when you could be accused of treason for supporting--”

“If you believe everything you hear,” he interrupts, seething at this unyielding, stubborn, willful girl, “you’ll know I’m capable of far worse than that. And who’s to say you’re my kin, anyway. For all I know, you’re just some whore who looks like my sister, out for some Lannister gold!”

He regrets it immediately after he says it. It was cruel, and also clearly not true: she glares at him with such trademark Lannister rage in her face that her green eyes might as well have been lion-handled daggers.

“Fuck you,” she snaps, pushing him roughly away. She grabs her skirts and stomps angrily past him, but not in the direction of the beach that she’d been fighting so passionately to return to just moments before. Seven hells. Infuriating.

They both now are moving angrily through the the bird-covered clearing, concern for the poor creatures’ peaceful rest far from their minds. It’s impossible not to grind them down into the ground. At a dip in the grass, a few lengths ahead from him, Dianna finally comes to an abrupt halt. She doesn’t look back at him, but instead stares ahead, down the gentle hill he assumes lies before her.

When he catches up, and stands beside her, he finally sees what caught her attention. At the bottom of a small valley, one quite free of dead birds, stand three women in flowing red dresses, shoulder to shoulder. They share identical expressions of serene bemusement.

“Oh great, it’s this lot,” he mutters. “Seven blessings!” he calls down to them, waving. Dianna shoots him an incredulous glance.

“Greetings, Kingslayer,” the middle one retorts coolly. Perhaps he should have been nicer. They might try to imprison him for a mysterious and possibly morally dubious quest, but they also might have one of those magical fast rowboats, which he could really use right now.

“We do not have such a boat,” the one on the left replies. “But come with us. We can help.”

Dianna looks at him like she’s waiting for a translation. He just shrugs in reply. “Some of us tell the truth around here,” he tells her.

“R’hllor will see you safely to where you need to be,” the one one the right end says.

“Our ship will take you to Westeros,” the middle one intones. “We tell the truth here also.”

Jaime sighs. He wants to turn around and run, but a part of him knows that doing so is futile.

* * *

The rain dissipates as the red women lead them, single file like a septon’s procession, over a series of low hills to another shore. This, it seems, is an island, and a sparsely populated one at that. Despite that, the women do not lie. A small schooner, intact and gently rolling in the waves, waits for them. It flies deep red sails and its decks are populated with a handful of gap-toothed men with flames tattooed over their faces. They drape warm woolen capes over then both and then ask them where they should go.

“Storm’s End,” Dianna answers after a brief pause. “It will buy us some time,” she explains.

They push off from the island under calming seas. They sit side by side on the deck, the horizon turning pink with the dim glow of approaching dusk ahead. “Just no more lies, all right?” he says. “You said it yourself. We’re family.”

“I’m not just some whore who looks like your sister?” she says, an edge to her voice. “Out for Lannister gold. You’d have to melt some coin down to get any these days.”

He rubs a hand over his face. “I’m sorry about that,” he says. “It’s been a...rough day.”

She laughs, softly, at that. “That it has.” She stares out at the horizon again, a deep pensiveness coming over her face. “You were right, in a way, though,” she says. “I did lie to you. Tyrion isn’t my father.”

“Oh?” He can’t help but feel a little sinking disappointment. He’s been getting used to having a real niece, vexatious as she may be. “Who then? Tyrek, is it?”

“No,” she says. “You are.”

He is at a loss for words, at that answer. “I can’t be,” he says, voice hoarse. “You’re not nearly old enough.”

She laughs again. “That’s your first thought? I am nearly one and twenty. Think back to just before then.” He doesn’t have to. He has been thinking about just before then this whole time. Perhaps it was possible. He was careless, that first night in Winterfell, and others besides. They had defeated the dead; they felt invincible, capable of bending the world to their will and casting aside all trouble that befell them. And Dianna’s stubborn nature and her boldness, alongside those Lannister eyes: evidence for a truth that he can’t deny and can’t believe he hadn’t seen before.

“I just learned it myself not too long ago,” she continues. “About a year and one half back, I made a stupid plan. I’ve always wanted to be a maester, see, ever since my childhood dreams of knighthood fell through quite spectacularly. I spent much of my time with the healers and the midwives. I buried myself in histories and Valyrian lessons. But I couldn’t convince them to let me go to Oldtown. We have women knights now, but the Citadel? Still off limits.

“So I plotted to sneak in. I was going to put on men’s clothing, and pack my things, and set off with Ser Brienne’s squire in the dead of night. We were saddling up the horses when she found us. I thought was was going to stop us, to drag me back to Tyrion and scold me with that stern voice of hers. But she didn’t. She gave us extra food and made her squire vow to see to my safety.”

He could see it: soft concern in her deep blue eyes, her mouth in a grave resolved line. Her father reluctantly let her chase her dreams in the middle of a war, expectations of her sex be damned. She would do the same, if given the chance.

“We got about three hours of riding in before the goldcloaks found us. Five of them for just the two of us. And they did drag me back to Tyrion. Him and the King. They sat in front of me and told me my plan was unacceptable.The King was just getting back onto good terms with the Citadel after insisting on a maester who didn’t finish his official training. And Tyrion had already arranged everything with the Baratheons.

“That night, Ser Brienne came to me. She was livid. And that’s when she told me the true story of the day I was born. I always knew it as I told you, when we first met. It wasn’t much different, except that there was no servant girl, no vows, just her unexpectedly giving birth to me alone in the castle, and being terrified that something would happen to me, the child of a traitor. Tyrion, of course, came up with this whole story, when she came to him. Better to be the bastard of a Lannister everyone likes, he said; she made him agree that he wouldn’t send me away. I still was furious with her. I yelled. I told her I was glad I was going to the Stormlands away from all these liars. I missed her but I still...she was the closest thing I had to a mother, but she could have been a real mother instead.”

Jaime knows that choice. He knows that lie. He thinks of another girl, on another boat, telling him that she knew he was her father. “It can’t have been easy for her,” he says. “She doesn’t like to be dishonest. She must have thoughtit was the best way to keep you safe.” It would have killed her, but if she saw it as her duty to another, to the realm, she would have done it no matter how much it hurt. He always admired that in her; he envied it.

The sun is almost setting now. The girl who is really a woman grown, the niece who really isa daughter, smiles a sad smile. “And yet, I wasn’t, in the end.”

He reaches his hand to take hers. “You will be now. I swear it.” He hasn’t much honor left, but he swears true now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For every doting ToddlerDad!Jaime, there must also be a “quit lying and don’t make me turn this car around” Dad!Jaime. It is known.


	4. The Castle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite the fanfare, it is a small procession. Tyrion, just as small and twice as gray, rides strapped to a handsome stallion. And beside him, flying the flags, are two knights. The one to his right rides with face uncovered, but even so he’d know her just by her bearing alone: towering in her gleaming armor, back straight and proud, riding purposefully like an avenging warrior goddess. Ser Brienne of Tarth. A sight in her rippling white cloak.
> 
> “We should probably go greet them,” Dianna muses, looking out.
> 
> “You first,” he replies. Neither of them move.

When Jaime stands in the drafty reception hall in Storm’s End, starting at stonework he last stared at while contemplating all the ways he would sneak around with Cersei while her boorish husband got drunk and killed the easiest prey he could find on the grounds, the full force of his reality finally hits him. This room is full of ghosts: booming laughs of a dead king; suggestive sly glances from a beguiling queen; brothers with awkward affection toward one another; a petulant boy, demanding attention, and wide-eyed, golden children, taking in the room with innocent eyes.

He feels a pain of longing mixed with guilt. He wants to hide from the memory but also to hold it in his hands and sink his face into it. Everyone who had traveled with him there, everyone who had greeted them, was dead, gone, and hated. Except him, the only one who would have gladly taken that fate instead. Why? For what purpose, really? Despite what the red women said, he feels not like a man destined for anything, but instead like a cruel joke, a mistake in need of correcting.

The castle guards had eyed him suspiciously as he trudged up the path behind Dianna with dirty hair and torn, bloodstained clothes. But they recognized her, his determined and resolute daughter (the thought of it, still!) near-instantly and set off running to find their lord after urging them inside. Jaime does not have much time to wallow in the great hall before Lord Gendry rushes in.

He doesn't remember much of him outside of that celebratory night in Winterfell, everyone raising their glass to the new Lord Baratheon, and even that much only because that night was memorable for other reasons. Still, he sees the resemblance to his natural family: Robert if he hadn't let himself go to seed; Renly if he had been allowed to grow into old age. He's a barrel-chested man, gray at the temples and in his beard. Inexplicably, he’s wearing a black patch over one eye. _Maybe the bannermen did do a number on him after all_ , Jaime thinks.

Lord Gendry pulls Dianna into a decorum-less hug. He cups her face and murmurs questions about where she’d been; about how they were worried; how the children cried for her still and how a party from the capital had visited not long ago on their way back from searching the stormlands yet again for her. She laughs a teary laugh at that;she’s truly still surprised that anyone would be looking for her.

”Gods,” Dianna laughs again, wiping a tear from her face, ”what on earth happened to your eye?”

”It’s a funny story, actually. A fortnight back--” Here the Lord pauses. He's just caught sight of the other person in the room and he fixes Jaime in a wide-eyed stare. ”Dianna,” he says, turning back to her, his voice urgent. ”Do you know who this man is?”

”I do, ” she says, softly. ”I know exactly who he is. And he me. Without him, I’d never had made it back. I trust him.”

Lord Gendry rubs his chin and assesses Jaime warily with his good eye. ”We have to tell someone,” he warns. Jaime feels the familiar sense of dread wash over him. He almost wishes that advance news of his return spread to Westeros before they’d even landed, so he could just get on with whatever horror awaited him instead of dragging it out.

”Then tell them,” Jaime interrupts. ”I’d wager your omnipotent king already knows I am here. If he wanted me dead, I would be.”

”Please, just wait a few days before you write to anyone,” Dianna pleads. ”We walked here from the shore. We just got off a ship from Essos, and before that a shipwreck, and before that someone stabbed him--”

Lord Gendry puts his hand on her shoulder. ”All right. You and your...guest can get your bearings first. But I can only hold off writing the crown for a short while. They’ll be wanting to see you anyway.” He puts his arm around Dianna’s shoulder and begins to walk them out of the great hall. It's an easy fatherly gesture that makes Jaime feel a pang of jealousy. ”Did you really end up all the way in Essos? No wonder we couldn't find you.”

* * *

  
Lord Gendry sets him up that first afternoon in a modest room in the castle and sends up a bath and then a maester, who is impressed with Dianna’s work on the wound on his thigh but scolds him for the bouts of exercise that have kept it from truly healing. _Of course_ , he thinks. _Should have just sat back and avoided all that for the good of my health_. 

After the maester restitches the edges and takes his leave, Jaime sinks back onto the bed. The soft, indulgent feeling of it activates a bone-weariness in him. For the first time in many weeks, he lets himself drift asleep without feeling on edge.

When he next wakes, it’s to a rapping at the door. He looks out the window, where a warm summer breeze tosses the curtains, and he can see that night has already fallen. He jumps up. He must have slept through the evening meal; while he hadn’t gotten the impression that their host much liked him, he didn’t know him well enough to know if he was the sort to also be offended. He’s only being treated well by the grace of Dianna’s standing with the family, and he doesn’t want to push his luck.

At the door, though, he learned that he needn’t be alarmed. It was just Dianna, carrying a tray of meat and cheese.

“They said you didn’t answer for supper,” she explains.

“You shouldn’t be coming to my chambers late at night,” he says. “People might get the wrong idea.”

She rolls her eyes. “We’re family.”

“You know that is not exactly a strong excuse. My reputation is not clean in these matters. Not that I—it’s not like that—you—“ He stumbles over the words and also the absurdity of his life: that he has to explain to his own child that he doesn’t want to bed her, and that others might assume that he does.

She waves him off. “It was probably for the best that you missed the meal. Lord Gendry was asking me all these questions about what you’ve been doing and what you are planning, and I didn’t have a good response.”

She pushes her way into the room, lays the tray down on a small table in the corner, and sits down in a chair to face him, all without asking for an invitation. “So—you’re going to give me one. The truth. Where have you been all these years? With the red women? Cruising the brothels in Volantis? Whatever it is, you owe me the truth.”

He does. He hadn’t known of her, when he rode south to save his sister, and he’s ashamed to admit that he’s not sure it would have made a difference if he had—he was needed and nothing would have stood in his way. But he knows the pain of familial indifference and would never wish that on one of his own children.

“I woke up on an island with a tribe of red priestesses not long before I found you in that place. They said I had only been with them for two moons, and that I had been brought to them from a different time. I don’t know if that’s the truth. But the last thing I rememberbefore that is being trapped under the Red Keep with my sister as we tried to escape the Dragon Queen. I found an unblocked tunnel in the rubble and was trying to get to safety, but instead, there was a damned cryptic priestess there, saying she’d been waiting for me. I was badly injured. It could be a hallucination. But I don’t know what else to tell you. It doesn’t feel like I was there for one and twenty years.”

She’s looking at him intensely, hands clasped tightly in her lap. Her face is carefully neutral but he gets the sense she doesn’t believe him. “They didn’t send you away to Essos and pretend you were dead this whole time? Brienne and Tyrion. They lied to me already. Why wouldn’t they do the same when it came to you?”

“My brother tried that, during the battle,” he says, shaking his head. “If it had worked, he would’ve been in touch. He would have brought me back on his own by now. He wouldn’t have been able to help himself.” He doesn’t know what Brienne would have done if she had known that he lived. Probably smuggle him a brief note notifying him of his child out of duty and then say nothing more to him, ever again. He’d have deserved nothing more.

“And me?” she asks.

“I swear—I didn’t know of you. I wish that I had.”

“In Volantis? You truly didn’t know what you were going to find at Glenara’s. You weren’t seeking your sister, or anyone else.”

“Truly, I didn’t,” he replies. “They told me Cersei was dead. And one of the priestesses took me away from their temple, brought me to that place, and told me to go inside. I did. And you were there.”

“Fate,” she muses. He nods in agreement and begins to eat from the tray, saying nothing more. Years ago he would have scorned the thought, but many legions of undead soldiers and haunting red priestesses later, he couldn’t see how it could be anything else.  
  


* * *

The next morning, Dianna comes back to his chambers to take him to Lord Gendry. He doesn’t find the story at all unbelievable, and in fact jumps in alarm when Jaime mentions the red priestesses.

“Dozens of them?” he says weakly. “You don’t think that they’ll plan to come here, will they?”

“I hope not,” he says. “They want me to save the prince who was promised, whatever that means. I don’t know who he is, but I don’t see any princes around here.”

His face goes completely white at that. “No,” he says. “Thankfully. But you can’t give them the prince, when you find him. They use king’s blood for their magic. One of them tried to take blood from me, because of my father. She held me captive. And Stannis burned his own daughter as a sacrifice during the war.”

 _What they want is not right_ , he remembers the old woman saying as she led him away in the dark of the night. He was unsure about this whole quest to begin with and now his blood turns to ice.

“I’m not about to do whatever they say just because they say it,” he says, for the first time taking the quest as his own, and feeling the strength of it. “But they say the prince needs saving, not killing. I will allow no harm to come to him, when I find him.”

“Or,” Jaime adds pointedly, “to anyone who might carry king’s blood, either.” He sees Lord Gendry visibly relax. He’d have said he’d never harm a child, but that was untruthful, and almost no one would believe he’s come to regret that act most of all in his life.

That night, though, as he joins the family for supper, smiling as the four young Baratheons fight for the attention of their Lady Dianna,he sees a shade of worry return to the Lord’s eyes. He pulls Jaime aside as they retire for the night.

“I know I promised Lady Dianna that I would give you more time,” he says in a low voice, “but I can’t risk the red women coming here. My children carry my blood in their veins. I sent a raven to the Lord Hand this morning after we parted telling him his daughter returned with the aid of a man calling himself Mr. Hill. I presume he will come himself to see her, and they’ll probably take you with them when they see you. I’ll let you stay until then, but no longer.”

Mr. Hill. It’s what they had told the curious children, all of whom were deeply interested in what had befallen their Lady.Mr. Hill met Lady Dianna when she was lost and helped guide her back home. They won’t see anything in the name, but he wonders if his brother would.

“I understand,” he says, trying to keep a sureness to his voice. “I’ll go with him gladly. I know it’s been a stretch of your hospitality to house a man like me regardless. I thank you for it.” Under other circumstances he’d just leave now to spare himself and everyone else the anguish. But the only place he could safely go would be to his brother, and it seems a foregone conclusion that his brother would soon be coming to him. And there is Dianna. He’s only just found her, and he isn't sure if he‘a ready to leave her just yet.

* * *

Tyrion’s reply comes quickly. His party has already left by the time the raven was even returned. Storm’s End is only a few days’ ride from the capital. 

He distracts himself from the ever-present rapid heartbeat in his chest by following Dianna around the castle. She mostly spends her days corralling the three youngest children into lessons on reading, writing, and history—things he remembers learning with a feeling of dread, but that they seem to love. Maybe it’s the spark in Dianna’s eyes as she tells them the stories of the past, or the warm praise she gives as they try their hand at penmanship. He might have enjoyed his lessons if they were delivered thus, too. The oldest son, a boy named Davos of three-and-ten, is sent miserably to split his time between the maester and the master-at-arms—a recent compromise, Dianna explains, so that the maester didn’t feel excluded from the education of their young heir.

“Seems he’d rather take lessons from you,” Jaime observes. She just smiles smugly. The next two oldest are girls, unlikely to receive attention from the maester, and then a boy of just three, too young for such and a second son besides. They all seem thrilled to have Dianna back.

For a man who had been Lord Paramount of the Stormlands for twenty years, his children are quite young. Dianna explains that he didn’t marry for five years after becoming lord, and even then had to be coaxed by members of the small council in the capital into courting the ladies of the lesser houses of his lands. “It’s rumored that he proposed marriage to someone he fell for at Winterfell during the battle against the dead,” she tells him, “but that she rejected him, and he was quite heartbroken after.”

He wasn’t the only one, on both counts, Jaime thinks, ruefully. Those weeks after the battle are now increasingly on his mind. If he goes back to the capital, Brienne will be there. It was heart-rending enough to leave her crying in the snow. He could only do it because never intended to face her again. Now, he might have to. He can picture the wrath in her eyes, the same that greeted him the first time they met. It sends fear and sadness and self-loathing down his spine.

Those same feelings come back the afternoon that the Hand’s retinue crests over the hills, flying a dark blue flag with a sigil Jaime doesn’t recognize. The young Lord Davos comes running into the room where they all sit, learning of the Dance of Dragons, and excitedly beckons them all to follow him to watch the procession. They race with the children to a high tower with a view of the path to the castle. Jaime lifts the youngest boy, Arry, to his shoulders to look out.

Despite the fanfare, it is a small procession. Tyrion, just as small and twice as gray, rides strapped to a handsome stallion. And beside him, flying the flags, are two knights. The one to his right rides with face uncovered, but even so he’d know her just by her bearing alone: towering in her gleaming armor, back straight and proud, riding purposefully like an avenging warrior goddess. Ser Brienne of Tarth. A sight in her rippling white cloak.

“We should probably go greet them,” Dianna muses, looking out.

“You first,” he replies. Neither of them move.

But then the second knight uncovers his face, and Dianna takes in a sharp breath, turns from him, and carries herself quickly from the window. He puts down Arry so he can follow his brother and sisters out of the tower after her. Jaime, for his part, stays put, hoping desperately that his vantage point is high enough that he won’t be visible to the retinue below.

The reunion moves him even from a far distance. Dianna launches herself into the arms of the young knight—undoubtedly the squire that brought the flush to her face on their voyage over. Brienne approaches her and holds Dianna’s face in her hands before crushing her in her own embrace. He sees Tyrion and Lord Gendry wiping at their eyes.

They move to enter the castle, and then, the spell breaks.

It’s both an eternity and no time at all before he hears footsteps and voices on the tower stairs. Dianna. Tyrion. Brienne. Could he crawl out the window and hide just out of sight? Maybe he’d fall and this would all be resolved. If the fall didn’t kill him, perhaps the irony would. He keeps his gaze firmly out the window, where servants are unloading the horses and leading them away.

“So, the mysterious Mr. Hill,” he hears Tyrion announce from inside the door. “I hearwe owe you a great debt.”

He breathes and prepares himself to face his brother. One. Two. Three.

He turns. “There’s no debt at all,” he says, his voice only barely steady.

The four of them stare. Tyrion’s eyes are wide; Brienne’s are wider. Beside them, Dianna nervously grips at the arm of her squire, a tall freckled redhead who, up close, he can see is no man at all, but a young woman with cropped hair and her own armor. Dianna smirks a bit at his presumably evident surprise, but the smirk quickly fades to alarm someone knocks him to his knees and slides a sword point deftly under his chin.

It’s Valyrian steel. He expects it. His eyes travel up the blade to the knight wielding it. Her face is slightly lined with the years, her hair still cut short around her ears and shot through with strands of silver among the light blonde. A long white scar runs down her cheek, but it doesn’t make her fearsome: it’s her deep, penetrating blue eyes, smoldering with anger that do.

She doesn’t look away when he meets her gaze, not does she lower the blade. “Identify yourself,” she says in a clear, clipped voice.

“Ser,” he says weakly. “I do believe you know me as Jaime Lannister.”

“You lie. Jaime Lannister is dead.”

“I assure you,” he replies, “that I am not.”

She pushes the blade lightly into his skin, and he can feel a trickle of blood run down his throat.

He looks her square in the eye again and searches for something to get through to her. “Two good deaths, on the Kingsroad. Three men, and two good deaths. Do you remember? No one else was there but you and me. I told you there were no men like me. Only me. I said a lot of cruel things to you on that trip, to get you to do what you are doing now.”

She swallows, but does not move.

“And despite that,” he continues, “you told me to live, when they took my hand. Live, fight, and take revenge. Do you remember? I can scarcely forget. I told you in Winterfell that I carried that with me for years. That it gave me strength. It still does.”

At that, she pulls back her sword. The rage on her face fades to something else, indecipherable and closed off. Jaime sags back against the stone wall. Tyrion looks up at Brienne for confirmation and she gives a small, tight nod of her head.

He walks forward and puts his hand on Jaime’s shoulder. “Brother,” he says, voice choked as it was the last time they met, in the Dragon Queen’s camp. “I always hoped I’d see you as an old man. I confess I am disappointed. I have more wrinkles than you do. How in the Seven did you survive? Where have you been? And Dianna? How did you, of all people, find her?”

“It’s a very long story,” he replies. His brother pulls him into an embrace, laughing.

“Yes, I expect it is,” he says. “Dianna, does Lord Gendry have any wine? I have a feeling we will need quite a lot of it.”

“I wish to retire to my chambers,” Brienne announces gravely, in the direction of her squire. Dianna jumps to attention and leads them down into the castle proper. As they file out down the stairway, Tyrion turns to give him a significant look with eyebrows raised. He expects it won’t be the last of these for quite some time.

* * *

Lord Gendry does indeed have wine, though Dianna has to work to persuade him to part with the quantities that they all require to discuss the weighty questions that lie between them. Brienne doesn’t join them, though eventually her squire does. Jaime learns she is Celia Tarly, daughter of Randyll’s oldest son, who took the black but then became a maester to King Bran. Tyrion insists they met at Winterfell, since they both fought the Army of the Dead, but Jaime has no recollection of any Tarly in the North. He was rather concerned with myriad other things, he supposes.

Tyrion isn’t shocked by his mad story of traveling through time, either. “I reckon we’ve dealt with stranger things,” he says when Jaime finishes the tale. “Plus, it makes me feel immensely better that you haven’t aged so well after all.” He’s more concerned with Dianna’s story of where she’s been; he looks deeply troubled to hear of the whore with the face of a Queen.

“Thank the gods that my brother found you when he did,” he says. “Cersei was not a popular Queen.” _Only one person even willing to guard her in the end_ , Jaime thinks, but then pushes that thought away. Not now. This moment is too happy for that.

Dianna reaches out to grasp Tyrion’s hand. “I’m all right, truly,” she reassures him. “You should know, though, that I’ve told Jaime the truth. Of everything.”

“Ah,” he says, locking eyes with Jaime. “Good that you did.”

“Oh, for gods’ sake,” the Tarly girl says. “We all here know that she’s really Ser Brienne’s child with the Kingslayer.”

“Ser Jaime,” Dianna corrects. Tyrion smiles at that.

The air between them is now lighter, as their heavier stories give way to laughter and tales of the new court and the crop of newly ascended highborn houses that now come to pay respects to the Stark king. Tyrion loves the intrigue at King’s Landing, much more than his strange king does, and Celia wistfully speaks of her training and her endearingly pure yearning to be a knight. Soon, Lord Gendry joins them, and they migrate to a late evening meal with the older two children. He’s an indulgent father; Tywin would never have allowed him and Cersei to stay up all night with important guests like this. All the while, Brienne is notably absent. Tyrion gives him another one of those looks when Lord Gendry asks after her.

“I’m sure she’s just tired after the long journey, my lord,” Celia says. “She often is.” Jaime knows that isn’t exactly true—even grown older, he doubts Brienne wears so easily—but he lets it go, and distracts himself with the newest turn of the conversation.

Lord Gendry is just about to explain his eye injury, finally, when they are interrupted by a child’s piercing cry from a nearby corridor.

Dianna stands. “Mya again,” she says to Gendry. “I keep telling you that we should get a lock on the outside of her door, cruel as it may seem.”

“I take no issue with it,” her sister Shireen, two-and-ten, says hotly. “She always ends up climbing into my bed and waking me at odd hours!”

“Speaking of bed,” Lord Gendry says, as Dianna leaves the table to go seek out the wailing child, “the two of you should be heading off.” The two children look positively perturbed, but with a firm tap on their backs from their father, they reluctantly rise from the table too.

Tyrion finishes his cup of wine. “Brother, I trust you know where I am to sleep,” he says,“because I am in no condition to seek it out myself.” From across the room, Gendry’s children giggle before being hushed by their father, who is clearly holding back his own amusement as he leads them out of the hall.

His brother is only slightly joking about his level of inebriation, but he’s in good spirits as Jaime leads him to his chambers and sees him off to bed. He’s immensely glad to have Tyrion here. Not too long ago he’d looked back upon laughing alongside his brother without any guard up with a deep, sorrowful grief— a memory of something he’d never have again.

He turns the corner to take the corridor back to his own room when he is startled by a door opening into his path. Out steps Brienne, wrapped in a robe, hair mussed with sleep. The familiar sight stops him in his tracks. As it does her.

“Sorry,” she finally says. “I though you might be the child again. She came by earlier but ran from me when I tried to help her.”

“Sorry,” he says back. “Only me. Dianna’s with her now. She’s quite good with the children.”

“Yes,” she replies, her gaze just past his shoulder, at the wall behind him. “They seem very attached to her.”

Jaime cannot stand for long on pretense. Perhaps it’s the wine. “Brienne, I know. She told me.”

She nods, stoically, still gazing away from him.

“I wish I had been there. I just want you to know that I haven’t stayed away willingly. And certainly would not have done if I had known. I want to explain it all to you.”

She shakes her head. “There’s no need. It’s done.”

“Please,” he implores. She looks over at him then, at that. It’s as painful as he imagined, to lock his gaze with hers again like this: alone.

“You should get some rest,” she says, pulling her eyes away again. He feels both relief and sadness as she does. “We’ll leave tomorrow for the capital. I’m sure the king will have need of you, to let you get this far. He likely expects you soon.”

He nods mutely and turns to go.

“I am glad to see that you’re all right,” she says, quietly, as he retreats. He turns to her once more, but it’s only her back, the soft click of the door, and then him alone, in the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only a minor _Dark_ reference here—gotta make room for the tense reunion(s). Next time, The Quest, and more _Dark_ -ness.


	5. The Quest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you wanted a more straightforward conversation, you shouldn’t have pushed me out of that tower,” the King replies, his tone changing not at all.

One day, Jaime will see a city on the horizon, and it will not make him want to throw up. That day is not today. Well, more correctly, it is not this night, because they have ridden without stopping from Storm’s End since early that morning. Brienne said it was wisest not to stop, lest rumors begin to spread about the return of the Kingslayer beyond their ability to control them. Everyone looked cross at this idea: Tyrion, who wanted another excuse to tarry in taverns, forestalling any end to their happy reunion; Dianna and Celia, who no doubt were hoping for a opportunity to hang to the back of their group, trading not-very secret glances.

However, no one wanted to defy Brienne. Jaime least of all. So they took an extra pair of horses at Lord Gendry’s instance, said their farewells to the teary-eyed children, and they rode off for a long, punishing, day. It was never under discussion that Dianna would stay behind. She seemed sad at parting from the children, too, but not as sad as Jaime would have been to part from her.

Under the cover of night, King’s Landing is, disturbingly, much as he remembers it. The streets aren’tquiet, but still sleeping and subdued at this late hour, and their path is lit not just by the moonlight overhead but also the glow of fires in the homes they pass. It is only as they circle around a walled garden, filled with towering trees draping into the road, standing where the Sept of Baylor used to be, that Jaime is reminded that this is now a new place.

The gold cloaks at the castle gates let them pass into the Red Keep without saying a word. Jaime dismounts his horse in the torchlit courtyard and looks up at the towers that he last saw as they crumbled to rubble in front of his eyes. Some of them are unchanged but many are smooth, new, fresh, even in the dim light of the moment.

“The builders did a good job putting it back together,” Tyrion assents, catching Jaime staring. To their right, he hears a huff of breath and the clash of armor: Celia’s arms are loaded down with hers and Brienne’s things, her head barely peeking out above the pile, and their pause has caused her to shift awkwardly.

“Yes, well,” Brienne says. “Until the morrow.” She turns and walks swiftly away from them, armor glittering in the night, her squire ambling off after her.

Tyrion touches his arm, and he spins back to face him. He’s giving Jaime another one of those annoying looks. “You can come with me,” he says to him. “They have your old chambers ready,” he then says to Dianna, gesturing ahead. So she parts from them, too, over the footbridge to the holdfast, and at last Jaime trudges up to the Tower of the Hand, the tower of his nightmares, too weary to do anything but blindly follow his brother and fall deeply into a tense, thankfully dreamless sleep.

* * *

  
The King sends for him the subsequent afternoon. Jaime knew he would, but that doesn’t stop him from pacing the length of Tyrion’s chambers over and over again, burning the image of the various lion tapestries on the walls into his brain, as he waited for his brother to return with the official word. He doesn’t think that this king will kill him, though he’d be within his rights. Jaime doesn’t know what this king wants with him. That is perhaps even more terrifying.

The King will see him alone in the throne room. It was not long ago that such a proclamation would instill looks of fear into everyone who heard it. Tyrion looks grave when he delivers the message, but also reassures him: “He says he just wants to speak to you.”

The Throne Room: the site of most of the most terrifying moments of Jaime’s life. Burnings. Murders. Cersei, finally the sole regent, a mad glint in her eyes beneath a crown that might as well be hewn from blood. The moment he meets King Brandon Stark is not one of these moments, but he is unnerved by it all the same.

The Iron Throne is gone. On the raised dais, instead, is a man with an expressionless gaze, in a wheeled chair of his own making. He is flanked by two Kingsguard, a young man he doesn’t recognize and a second whom he definitely does. Ser Podrick Payne, grown to his full height. He’s wearing a tight, uncomfortable expression on his face and a very familiar Valyrian steel sword at his waist. There’s something very right about both halves of Ned Stark’s sword guarding his son’s reign. Jaime nods to him, trying for warmth, but Podrick doesn’t return it, which is just as well.

“Ser Jaime,” the King proclaims, even though they have been granted a private audience in the empty room. “It seems we are not rid of you.”

He grimaces but bows low to the smirking King, no longer a boy but now his contemporary, a man in middle age. “Unfortunately not, Your Grace.”

“My Hand has told me your story. A most unbelievable one.”

“It’s the truth,” he says.

“I know,” the King replies.

Jaime takes a deep breath to restrain himself from asking the king if they are going to get on with it.

“You have a quest,” the King continues. “I would like you to continue it, on behalf of the crown.”

“It would help if I knew more about this quest,” Jaime replies. “Your Grace,” he adds hastily.

The King smirks again. “You will save the Prince Who Was Promised, so that he can lead us into the Light. You will know him and the quest when they call to you. I know that you will because I have seen it.”

“Perhaps you could share just the name or general location of the prince, though?”

“If you wanted a more straightforward conversation, you shouldn’t have pushed me out of that tower,” the King replies, his tone changing not at all. Jaime can see Ser Podrick bite back a smile of his own.

“If you need anything, please tell my Hand he is free to ask for it. Good luck, Ser Jaime. I look forward to seeing how it all plays out.”

And with that, Jaime is dismissed, not a whit of anything much clearer.

* * *

  
“He said he’s seen it?” Tyrion asks him, as he relays the odd audience later that evening.

“Yes, and that he looks forward to seeing how it all plays out,” Jaime repeats. “With all these people running around Westeros with the power to see the future, you’d think we’d have had far shorter wars.”

“That’s just it,” Tyrion says. “Bran can’t see the future, not really. The present and the past are where he dwells.” He takes a drink from a goblet of wine and looks at Jaime pensively. “Didn’t you come here from the past? Perhaps you need go back into it to find your prince.”

Jaime drains his own wine and doesn’t reply.

The King has made it clear that Jaime’s quest is the utmost priority for the crown, and so both he and his brother are given ample time to pursue it. It’s a rather expansive mission, but they settle on two starting points: narrowing down who the prince may be, and figuring out how Jaime moved through time in the first place.

The first task is the easier one. Jaime insists that the Prince must be a Targaryen, for no reason other than he has a feeling about it.It’s where he first heard the phrase ‘prince who was promised’ and it makes a mysterious kind of sense to him. Tyrion is skeptical, but he has the maester Samwell Tarly, a rotund man who Jaime still does not remember, bring him up copies of every Targaryen history that they have in the castle library. They spend several days combing through them, writing down the names of every prince in the family and fixing them to the wall behind Tyrion’s desk in a rough timeline. Even excluding all the bloody Targaryen kings, there are scores and scores of them, and they all seem to have the same four or five names; Jaime occasionally stands back from their work feeling a shade more bewildered and overwhelmed each day.

Dianna squints at the wall in amusement when she stops by to visit them. “This looks like the ravings of a madman,” she says. “Also, you’re forgetting the princesses. In Valyrian there is no difference between the two words, and this whole thing comes straight from those Volantene priestesses. They might have misunderstood the gender.”

“I told you,” Tyrion says, smugly.

“If we add in the princesses, we’re going to have to start tacking things up on the ceiling,” Jaime sighs. Dianna just grins, picks up a book, and settles into an armchair against the other side of the wall.

Finding his path to the past—now _that_ task is a true challenge. Jaime remembers little of that awful night under the collapsing Red Keep. He remembers a tunnel, one that opened up onto the beach, but Tyrion says that the only such tunnel is the one he was supposed to use, the one blocked up with bricks. He also remembers looking up and seeing a sky full of stars, which everyone tells him is ridiculous, because directly above him would have been a level of dungeons, and a storeroom full of empty wine barrels above that.

They have done a lot of discussing, and a lot of looking at tatters of the remaining plans of the Red Keep from the reign of Maegor I, but they haven’t done the obvious thing: actually go down to the cellars. “I’ve not been down there once in the past twenty years, since,” Tyrion admits. He had thought that he found their bodies, and he couldn’t go back. He took tunnels around the Red Keep, and the city, but he always bypassed the ones leading to that spot.

They finally travel there together. The dragon heads are gone. “Crushed,” Tyrion explains. Ironic; it took a dragon to really end the reign of the dragons. The cellars are strangely empty now. The stones of the walls and floors are a jumble of new smoothness and old jagged stone, much like the outside of the castle.

 _I don’t want to die. I want our baby to live._ Cersei’s last words echo, painfully, in the bare chamber. He wishes he could have given her what she needed. He wishes the baby could have lived, too. A child who had committed no sin save to be unlucky enough to have Cersei and Jaime as its parents, placing it in mortal danger.

“I think this is the place where you were, when I left you,” Tyrion says. Jaime nods, and does something he doesn’t think he would do—he gets down to the dusty stone floor, and lays flat. Tyrion looks only faintly amused to be standing over him.

“What do you suppose the Dragon Queen thought when she found my body missing?” Jaime asks him. Tyrion shrugs and sits on the ground by his legs, facing him opposite.

“She probably didn’t even know it was,” his brother says. “No one would have let her see a mistake like that, that day.”

A few minutes of silence pass. Then Tyrion jumps to his feet and points off ahead of him to something behind Jaime’s head.

“That whole corner,” he says, urgently. “It’s all new.” Jaime cranes his neck and he sees it too: an expanse of floor, wall, and ceiling, all pristine stone and mortar. Perhaps enough joints collapsed to reveal a sliver of the world outside. He can almost recall it now—turning his body that way, dragging it over broken stones, to an opening carved half into the floor, half into the wall just behind.

The King said he’d know it when he saw it. And he knows.

Samwell Tarly looks rather distressed when they tell him that they want to start breaking up the new stone deep in the foundations of the Red Keep. “You know how much work it was to map all that out and get enough men and stone to repair it,” he protests to Tyrion. “It took us seven years and we almost went to war with the Vale!” But the Hand of the King has full authority from the King to do anything he wants for this particular quest, so they quite easily requisition several pickaxes and a set of burly men from the castle guard to wield them.

Tarly stands with Jaime and Tyrion as the gold cloaks reduce the corner to rubble. Sure enough, beneath a layer of mortar is a stone-choked round opening hewn whole cloth from the rock on which the castle stands. Among greater disarray, it might have appeared like just another bit of damage to be patched up. A few more strikes at the rocks filling the space, though, reveal that they echo when they fall. Behind lies nothing: a vast hollow expanse.

They set to excavating the tunnel, which someone had diligently and very efficiently filled in with the remains of the rubble that had probably fallen in on his head. They can easily pull away a few of the stones that crumbled on their first strikes, but the following days are a slow procession of removing each stone one by one. A gold cloak pries it free, hands it to another one, who then hands it to Jaime, who lobs it one-handedly into a growing mess of rocks near where Tyrion sits, not helping at all. Jaime’s sore and feeling very much his age, but it feels good to work, and the more time he spends in this place, the less it fills him with regret and the stabbing pain of failure.

“So this is where everyone is,” he hears someone call out derisively on their third day of this. Brienne. He nearly drops the stone he’s holding onto his foot. Since they parted on arrival, he hadn’t caught so much as a whisper of her.

“I’ve got only four Kingsguard watching over this entire Keep, with no help from anyone, and I just had to run a small council meeting by myself,” she says, her mouth a firm, enraged line. All of the men have stopped working—except for Tyrion, who wasn’t working to begin with—and are looking thoroughly chagrined. He must look a terrible sight, Jaime thinks. He rubs at his face, hoping it isn’t covered in dirt, though he may have just made it worse.

“The King says this work is of the highest priority,” Tyrion says to her.

Brienne isn’t placated at all. “Well, there are other duties besides just this one,” she says. “I hope you finish whatever it is soon so that we may all focus on them to the fullest, as we have sworn to do.”

She leaves then. It takes Jaime a bit to stop watching her go and get back to work.

* * *

Tyrion would say that he is predictable, but that night, after cleaning up from the day’s exertions, he decides to seek her out. Ostensibly, he wants to apologize for monopolizing the crown’s resources for the past few days, which he knows has placed more work on her plate. But he also wants to stop being so thrown off balance by her presence each time he’s in it. Like with the cellars, he wonders if he spent more time getting used to it, it would be easier to bear. 

She didn’t take off his head when she first saw him, which had been a real concern he had on the voyage over here. So perhaps it would be possible, to be in her presence, as comrades at least, until he needs to leave on his quest.

When he arrives in the common room in the White Sword Tower, Brienne isn’t there. He is a bit disappointed, because it means that he’d spent the whole walk over here feeling nervous for no reason. The room looks entirely different; new furniture, new tapestries, and probably new walls too.

It’s also not entirely empty. Sitting in a chair by the window, polishing a suit of armor, is her squire, the red-headed girl who he occasionally saw walking the halls with Dianna. Surprisingly, she’s glad to see him. “Ser Jaime! I’d been wondering when you’d visit here. Dianna says you’re going to go back in time to save a prince. Are you scared? You probably aren’t. After stopping the Mad King’s wildfire plot and fighting the dead, nothing must scare you anymore.”

He’s taken slightly aback by her enthusiasm. He remembers following the Blackfish and Arthur Dayne around with the same bubbling excitability, but he’s no Blackfish. He’s an extremely bad Kingsguard with one hand. And how does she even know about Aerys and the wildfire?

“You seem to know a lot about me,” he says back.

Celia puts down the armor and leans forward. “Of course!” she says. “It’s all in the white book. King Bran had Ser Brienne re-write the first half of your page in the book after he saw what you and Ser Barristan had in there about the Mad King and Tyrion causing Joffrey’s death; he said both statements were historically inaccurate.”

“Of course,” she continues, “now that you’re back, she’ll have to edit it again—it says you died defending your Queen, which isn’t true either.”

“I often wish that it was,” Jaime replies. Instead he didn’t die and he defended no one.

“Of course you do,” Celia says breathlessly.“Ser Brienne said that if I wanted to understand the kind of sacrifices that a true knight must make, I had to read your page.”

She always sees everything about me in the best light, he thinks sadly. And now she has an acolyte who thinks of him as a bloody role model. All he can do is just shake his head.

“Speaking of Ser Brienne,” he finally says, his voice not as strong as he’d like it to be, “do you know where—“

“Oh, she’s upstairs in the Lord Commander’s quarters. You probably know the way already,” Celia says. But then, catching his face perhaps, she offers to go fetch her instead, and scampers up the stairs.

Brienne enters the room a few long moments later, thankfully unaccompanied. She bows her head at him in an absurdly formal greeting. “What can I help you with, Ser Jaime?” she says, standing up straight and stiff at the foot of the stairs, fully dressed in her leathers like she’s about to fight off an intruder.

“Earlier,” he says. “I just wanted to apologize for earlier.”

“What for?” She furrows her brow, narrows her eyes.

“I know how it feels to have the responsibly for this whole place on your shoulders,” he replies. “I wasn’t thinking. We don’t need all those men anymore. I’ll send them back to their posts.”

She nods. “Thank you. Thankfully the castle doesn’t need quite as much defending as itdid back in your day. But it will be good to have it off my mind.”

“How did you get that scar, then? If it doesn’t need much defending.”

She touches her face, running a finger down the length of the white mark that stretches from forehead to jaw. “It’s awful, is it? It was a Dothraki. A few stayed behind after the Dragon Queen died, roaming the Reach. They drove Ser Bronn to distraction.”

It isn’t awful, but he knows she would be difficult to persuade otherwise. “So you stopped them,” he says, instead. “I’m not surprised.”

“Hardly. They’re still there. Mostly they stay away from the cities now. Ser Bronn isn’t Lord of Highgarden anymore, though; he passed about five years back. The pox. The widow Lady Blackwater holds it for now until her oldest son comes of age. He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he? I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. I didn’t know him well. He served as master of coin for a while after King Bran was crowned, but Tyrion sent him home to watch over the Reach.”

“And probably to get a less miserly Master of Coin, too,” Jaime replies. He didn’t expect to miss Bronn, of all people, but he finds that he does, a bit.

“Well,” Brienne says with a flutter of a half-smile. “It’s in poor taste to speak ill of the dead.” He laughs at that, imagining the sternSer Brienne trying to make deals with Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, and perhaps a bit too loudly out of the nerves that haven’t left him.

He swallows nervously. “I did hope, also, to speak to you of other things.”

Brienne looks at the ground. “I said before—it’s done. It has been a long time.”

“Not for me,” he says. “You must have heard by now how it is that I have returned here.”

“Yes,” she replies. “It’s a most curious story.”

“It’s the truth,” he says, like he has countless times before.

She meets his eye then, finally, and crosses her arms, leaning back against the wall. “So speak,” she says, quietly, a note of challenge in her voice. “Say what it is you want to say.”

It occurs to them that he doesn’t really know. He just knows that he wants to—needs to—say something.

“I suppose I just want to say that I wish it could have been different,” he says after a few moments. “I wish I didn’t leave things that way. It’s not what I intended, from the start.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks away. Did he really think this would make him feel better? He was sorely mistaken. It feels awful, like he has breathed in a lungful of smoke but hasn’t yet breathed out.

“Well,” he says helplessly. “I guess that’s it. I should probably be off.”

“Yes,” she replies, to the table to his left. “Me as well. Do let Celia know if you need anything,” she adds. “Weapons. For your quest.”

“Not that one,” he says, pointing to the sword at her waist, the one he gave her, the one she carries still. “That one’s still yours.”

“I know,” she says, smirking just a bit. “I wasn’t offering.”

* * *

He does get his sword, a fine newly-made blade from the Kingsguard armory. Celia all but begs him to come practice with her in the yard, but he avoids it, citing preparations for the quest. In truth he doesn’t want everyone to see him bested by a squire shorter and younger than him, which he surely would be.

The tunnel in the cellar is now fully clear. An enormous pile of stone sits to the left of the entrance. Tyrion had himself at a crook in the center of it as Jaime and the two men he retained finished the rest of it, like an absurd little throne.

It falls to them now to go inside it. Before he enters fully into any past, or future, he wants to know his way around. Jaime slaps his brother on his back and tells him cheerfully that his small size is now an asset to them and not a hindrance. Jaime has to stoop a bit to get inside it, but his brother can easily fit and carry a lantern ahead.

The tunnel does not lead straight out to any shore. Instead, it twists and turns an interminable amount. They must climb up steep inclines and stutter down them again just the same. It’s immediately clear that they cannot map it all in one day. Instead they spool white yarn out behind them and follow it down each new turn and back out again. Jaime sketches the day’s progress out each night from memory, so he’ll have something on hand to get around when he goes into them officially.

Some nights Dianna’s there, surveying his progress, fitting the increasing sheets of parchment together to show a complete map. “When you get to where all this goes,” she asks him, “will you come back?”

“I’d like to,” he says. It’s not a lie. He could bear it, living out the remainder of days in this stupid castle. His daughter is here. The King he tried to kill is leaving him alone, his brother keeps making him laugh, and Brienne actually looked at him when they passed in the corridor the other day. It wouldn’t be a bad life, surrounded by second chances and the possibility to make something else of himself.

“I’ll come back,” he tells her.

“Good,” she says, “because if you don’t I’ll have to come in after you myself, and we all know how dreadful I am with weapons.”

He laughs to himself at that idea the next night as he sits alone at his desk —Dianna stumbling around the tunnels in her long skirts, pulling him around like she did in Volantis with no idea where she’s headed. He’s drawing out a new length of tunnel. They’ve now discovered a crossroads, of sorts, with many new tunnels leading off in all directions. He cannot believe he crawled through all of this on his own, injured. Then again, the heat of battle and fear in the blood compels men to do many unfathomable things, like charge down a dragon.

The door slams open. It’s Brienne, dressed again for battle, this time in full armor. She does not knock or even say hello.

“Have you seen Celia or Dianna?” she asks. “They told me they were dining with you and Tyrion, but I just passed Tyrion on his way from the King and he said you already ate together and you were alone up here.”

“They told me they were both with you tonight,” he said.

Brienne looks more panicked than perhaps she should be. The memory of Dianna going missing is probably still fresh in her mind, and she didn’t grow up with siblings causing trouble or a lover to sneak around with as a youth.

She races out of the room and he can hear her rattling up the stairs, toward Tyrion’s chambers at the top of the tower.

“Brienne,” he calls after her. “Stop. They are probably fine. They just want a moment to themselves.” She couldn’t possibly not know about what was between them. Ever since Storm’s End, they couldn’t take their eyes off each other whenever both were in the same room. It was kind of sweet, he had to admit.

But then, he finally reaches her, and follows her in to Tyrion’s unlocked room, and he changes his mind. The names of all the Targaryen princes (and princesses), once spread across two whole walls, are now all gone. In the floor, just near the bed, a small door is open, and he can see a long ladder dangling down into the darkness below.

Brienne meets his eye. “I think they’ve gone that way,” she says. “Where could they possibly be headed?”

Jaime wants to ascribe—well, _innocent_ isn’t the right word; perhaps _not alarming_ is better —motives to this whole thing. But he knows exactly where they’ve gone.

They’ve gone on his quest. And the real question isn’t _where_. It’s _when_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOUTHS! Gotta keep an eye on them; they might be dabbling in the space/time continuum while you’re all caught up in your various dramas from several decades ago.


	6. The Prince

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who are you?” he asks again, his voice shaking, barely a whisper.
> 
> “Can’t you tell, lad?” Jaime says. “I am _you_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Behold: plot! In fact, so much plot that I had to break this chapter into two.

The tunnels to the past grow smaller with Brienne beside him. Jaime was lucky to get her here as quickly as he did; she’d wanted to crawl down the ladder in the Tower of the Hand and check the passageways under the Keep, but she was too big in her armor to fit through thedoor in the floor. If the situation wasn’t so serious, it would have been amusing, but Jaime couldn’t bring himself to laugh.

He had felt utterly unprepared in that moment. In truth, that wasn’t so. He’d been preparing for weeks now. He’d scribbled Tyrion a note— _back soon; I promise_ —and knew exactly what he needed: his sword, a lantern, the map. He knew the way to the cellar room without having to think. The white yarn they’d used to trace their path still rested on the ground. And now here they are, inching along the tunnels. They fall in step with one another without hesitation, like soldiers on the battlefield once more. They don’t need to speak much as they surge ahead, calling out for their daughter and her squire.

Dianna and Celia could be anywhere in time. Did they know where they were going, when they set off? Or did they just follow the path wherever it may take them? He sees Celia facing off uselessly against the first Targaryen dragon, Dianna’s body lying limply behind. He sees Dianna alone in the black cells, no one to hear her scream. He sees the two of them dead in the cellars, shot through with Tyrion’s crossbow as he made his escape.

They follow the white yarn deeper and deeper into the earth. He holds the lantern; Brienne holds her sword aloft like an attacker might lunge out at them at any minute. She catches his bemused half-glance as they round a tight corner. “What?” she grunts. “Did you not ever think that something might be living down here? That this place had a whole life before you _discovered_ it?” In fact, he had not. If he had another hand he’d probably have gotten his sword out too, then, the damp walls now casting a much more ominous shadow in their path.

In the small round clearing, where the tunnels branch out into crossroads, the white yarn suddenly runs out. They had planned to bring another on their next visit. Brienne stops and just looks at him, terror glinting on her face in the flickering lamplight. “Do you know where each of these go? We cannotpossibly search them all,” she says, though he knows she would, if she had to—she’d hurtle herself down each different past and scour the centuries for Dianna even if it took her all the rest of her years. He shakes his head no, and her eyes dart wildly at each opening, resolve creeping into the firm line of her mouth and directness of her gaze.

 _We’ll find her. You needn’t worry._ He doesn’t say either of these things, though, because he doesn’t know if they are true. He looks down at the ground instead, taking a deep breath, thinking of what to do next.

At his feet, the last bit of tattered white yarn lies abandoned on the cold stone. Yet, it does not truly end. Where the white string stops, a new one begins: a thin red thread, knotted together with the fraying white strands. Jaime puts down the lantern and lifts it up—it runs ahead of them, to a tunnel just to the right, into darkness.

“Follow the red thread,” he murmurs, lifting it so Brienne could see.

She lets out a laugh that could also be a sigh of relief. Pure Dianna.

She takes the lantern and he takes the thread, delicate and limp in his hands. They forge ahead. The tunnel they take now is even narrower; they must practically crawl on their hands and knees. Brienne’s armor makes a ridiculous scraping sound as it drags along the stone. Jaime hits his head on a rough outcropping of rock and sends a tiny shower of stones cascading onto their heads that chime like little bells as they hit her steel plate.

“There!” Brienne says, triumphant, her voice in time with the ringing of her armor. “There’s a light ahead. We must be close.”

He can barely see around her to even glance the lantern she holds. “I’m unharmed back here; thank you for asking.” She ignores him and they both pick up speed.

They are, thankfully, close. Wrenching himself upright, Jaime enters finally into a room made not from within a rock but constructed with it. A single lit torch rests in a notch on the wall, casting about a flickering orange glow. He begins to laugh.

It’s the same bloody room they just came from.

Brienne turns to him then, full of fury.It stops his laughter completely. “This is not a laughing matter! My daughter is _missing_ in time and we’ve just spent over an hour crawling around underground for no reason!”

He wants to say _our daughter, not just yours_ , but then he notices something—just behind Brienne, where there should be a huge hulking pile of stone: nothing. There is nothing there.

“Brienne,” he says, ignoring the look on her face, which he can’t bring himself to interpret right now. “There’s no stone. This isn’t the same room. This isn’t—“

“The same time,” she breathes, understanding alight in her deep blue eyes.

The next chamber over confirms their suspicions: it is not empty and patched anew, as when he left it, nor is it full of menacing dragon heads, as when he descended here with Cersei just before this whole turn of events began.

It is filled with wooden barrels. He doesn’t need to guess what’s in them. Or when in time they are. He knows instantly. He saw those barrels adorning the edges of his nightmares for years.

Brienne is leading the way, holding the lantern high, and she feels him stop. She spins to face him. He knows she can read his face, at least. She gives him a questioning glance; a workmanlike query for confirmation.

“Don’t touch anything,” he tells her. “This is wildfire.”

* * *

  
They move slowly after that, picking their way gingerly through a maze of deadly weapons. The sea of wildfire barrels stretches farther ahead than he can remember. Jaime desperately wants to be out of here. With every step it becomes harder to breathe. It was one thing to be trapped in a combustible castle with a madman, all those years ago. It is even more terrifying to be back here again, with more people he cares about within reach of the flames. 

In a narrow passageway, he and Brienne walk single file alongside a long, menacing row of barrels. She traces the line of them with her gaze and then glances his way, and he can see plainly that she’s horrified. _It’s one thing to hear a story_ , he supposes.

“I know,” he says, trying to be reassuring. “But it doesn’t pan out. It’s going to be all right.” He hopes that he can still count on himself to do the right thing—that he hasn’t ruined it by virtue of arriving here with a daughter and two knights in tow. He wonders how much time they have. Has the Mad King burned the Starks yet? Is Rhaegar at the Trident or here, at court? He doesn’t know how long Aerys had been plotting the city’s destruction. They didn’t have much leave to discuss it.

At last they reach a passageway free of barrels. Just ahead is a narrow stairway, one that he knows, eventually, will lead to door in the kitchens. He breathes a sigh of relief. Even though there is no breeze, the air feels cooler already.

Relief lasts but a minute. Interrupting it are the sounds of frantic footfalls down the stone steps and the bobbing of a lantern light down the passage toward them. Brienne pulls him back into the shadows but it’s too late: whoever it is has stopped moving. They’ve been found. He unsheathes his sword and steps forward to face off against their discoverer and is confronted with the same: a figure advancing toward him in the dim light, sword casting a long shadow on the wall.

“Ser Jaime?” the figure asks. They lower their sword and step closer. It’s Celia Tarly, dressed in shining armor just like her mentor. And behind her, just emerging, disheveled but blessedly unharmed, is Dianna.

“Thank the Seven,” Brienne blurts, rushing toward them. “What were you thinking? Especially you, Celia—I thought you would have been more reasonable.”

“Brienne,” Dianna interrupts. “Not now. We have to get out of here. We heard men talking in the hall. The Lannister Army is outside the city gates. This castle is going to fall soon.”

It turns out that they don’t have much time at all. The Starks are already dead. And Rhaegar is neither here nor at the Trident. He’s dead too. In a matter of hours, his family will be as well.

Unless. Of course. The one who was promised. Perhaps he could save even more than one. A prince and two princesses. He could save them after all, like he always wished.

“Go back the way you came,” he tells her. “No one disturbed us as we followed. You’ll have a clear path.”

“You’re not coming?” Dianna asks.

“The prince,” he reminds her. “Or princess. Or maybe both. They’re here and they need me to save them. I couldn’t, then, but maybe I can now. This is my quest.”

“You cannot mean for us to leave you here,” Brienne hisses.

“Go,” he tells her. “You can get these two to safety. In case I fail.”

She just stares at him then, her blue eyes a piercing mixture of anger and challenge and disbelief.

She turns to Celia. “Celia, take Dianna back to the tunnels. Go back to our time and do not look back.”

“No,” Jaime says. “Please go with them. It isn’t safe for you to be here.”

“Why are you so determined to die in this wretched place, Jaime?” she spits out at him. “To go off to your doom alone, with none of us knowing what happened to you?”

“We really have to go,” Dianna says anxiously, pushing past them.

“Pardon me,” a new voice rings out. “But no one is going anywhere.” A squat man emerges silently from the darkness.

“State your names, and how you came to be in this place,” says Lord Varys, his arms folded and his eyes flinty in the lamplight.

They are all speechless, then. _Hello, I’m Jaime Lannister from the future, here to save the day, hopefully!_ is not likely to get them very far. Celia and Dianna quite possibly have no idea who this man even is.

“Lord Varys,” Brienne begins. _Oh no_ , he thinks. Brienne’s honesty will be exactly the wrong maneuver.

He isn’t the only one who thinks so. Dianna steps forward, standing tall and tossing her hair over her shoulder.

“I am the Lady Cersei Lannister of Casterly Rock,” she calls out imperiously. “My father sent me with these men to get a message to my brother on his behalf.”

 _Oh no_ , he thinks.

* * *

To someone who has never spent much time around Cersei, Dianna’s impression would be flawless: her proud, practiced smile; her haughty gaze; her clipped, entitled tone of voice. In truth it is more like a caricature, a one-note version of her played by someone who has only heard tales where she acts the villain.

At first, it seems that Lord Varys doesn’t see through the farce in the way that Jaime does. He cocks his head and gazes at them all quizzically for a moment. He beckons them all to follow him back down the narrow tunnel lined with barrels and then down a different one, veering off to the side. They walk at a rapid pace behind him and Jaime realizes that they must be traveling clear across the castle. Do they have time for this? He knows things are going to start unfolding, rapidly, and he wants to see if he can rescue a prince or princess, _before_.

Varys takes them up a narrow stairway and then opens a door into a wide, dark anteroom. Jaime recognizes the place and the long dark the corridor ahead when his eyes adjust, though it is empty, dusty and worn with disuse.

“You mean to put us in the dungeons?” he asks him. The man just raises one barely visible eyebrow and regards him in silence.

“We may speak privately here,” Varys replies at last. “The king has his own methods for justice that render these cells unnecessary. I wonder, what has possessed Tywin Lannister to send his prize marriageable daughter into enemy territory on the eve of a siege? It is most unlike the man to be so reckless with his heirs.”

“It was not his doing, my lord,” Jaime interjects quickly, before Dianna can push this situation even more out of control. “The lady Lannister devised this plan. Her father saidhe would take the side of the crown if His Grace will release Ser Jaime Lannister from the Kingsguard to return to his place as heir, and the lady set out in secret with us as her guard to see it done.” It was an absurd story, full of holes, but it will have to do. He hopes that a dangled mirage of a secret cease-firenegotiation will pique the interest of a political man desperate to escape the nightmare that he knew had been engulfing everyone within these walls.

It seems to work. Varys just nods, slowly. “Wait here,” he says, and he takes his leave of them. As the door closes behind him, though, Jaime hears the unmistakable turn of keys in a lock.

“Did he just lock us in the dungeons?” Dianna asks. Celia steps forward to the door and bangs on it in outrage, calling for him to let us out.

“Stop,” Jaime warns her. “We aren’t in a real cell. I think we might have a chance.” Celia and Dianna do not look convinced. Neither does Brienne, really; she issizing up the door like she is trying to calculate how hard she’d have to throw herself against it to break it down.

“He only did not try to disarm us because he was outnumbered and unarmed,” Celia points out. “Ser.”

“Yes, but this man is not one to overpower those he needs to dispatch,” Jaime explains. “If he wanted to be rid of us, he could have taken us straight to the king or allowed us to stumble on to him ourselves.”

He walks toward Dianna, places his hand on her shoulder. “Keep your hair over that tattoo,” he says, firmly. “And if The Spider does bring...me...down here, keep to the shadows and try not to talk too much. As soon as you opened your mouth I knew you weren’t her. I will do the talking.”

She nods, and sinks into the room’s lone chair, alongside the door, to wait.

The rest of them sit too, then, their backs against the far side of the wall and their legs spread out all the floor. Their lanterns have burned low by now, and the room is full of an eerie darkness.

At last, the lock turns, and the door slides open, slowly, heavy and ragged across the stone floor.

The man at the entrance wears a flowingwhite cloak over his armor and holds a small lantern aloft in his right hand, and Jaime feels a twinge of longing run through him. _To see yourself as a young man, standing before you is a strange thing_ , he thinks, absently. He is struck by how soft he looks, despite this supposedly being his prime of youth—he is barely a man, more lean than solid, more coiled energy than the imposing fighter he’d imagined himself to be at that age.

“Cersei?” he whispers. It’s an angry whisper, but it holds an edge of wild hope, too. Every time it gets too terrible to bear, Jaime knows, that boy is envisioning something like this in his mind’s eye: Cersei, more golden and much bolder than she really is in life, coming to rescue him from the horrors that have befallen him. In truth she would never.

“Hurry,” Dianna whispers back, stepping just barely into the circle of light. “You need to get us out of here, and I’ll explain everything.”

The boy cannot help himself. He puts the lantern at his feet and he pulls her into a tight embrace, his body melting too closely into hers. Jaime can’t make them out—the light is too dim—but he closes his eyes tightly anyway to fend off the discomfort and shame. He can’t hear anything from Brienne or Celia alongside him. He wonders if they are as transfixed in horror as he is as the young Jaime presses audible kisses to Dianna’s skin, too fervent to be just chaste greetings between dear siblings. His stomach turns. Is this how everyone else felt when they imagined him and Cersei together?

“Cersei,” he says again, desperately. “Why did you come here? I’ve missed you, terribly, but this is madness. Aerys could have you burned alive if he knew you were in the capital. He _will_.”

Dianna doesn’t respond right away. Probably too stunned at being groped by her future father. “Get us out of here,” she repeats in a soft whisper.

He grabs her hand and and bends down to take the lantern. In that moment, the boy finally sees with his eyes and not the other, less objective parts of his body, and locks eyes with Jaime.

“Seven hells,” he says, holding the lantern high to scan the opposite wall where the rest of the party sits. Jaime smiles and nods at his younger self, whose unlined face is comically ashen. “Who are they?”

“Did you think your sister would come into enemy territory unguarded?” he asks. _Did you really ever think she would come at all?_ “We are three Lannister men and we have come to your aid. I know you hold this castle alone. We want to help you protect Elia and the children.”

“My father won’t let any harm come to them,” the boy says. He’s so very convinced; he still believes in the goodness and honor of men.

Jaime just laughs, darkly. “He won’t? Look what he does to your brother, his own child. Tell me that is not a man that would harm a stranger’s family if it served his purposes.”

“You speak plainly for a loyal banner man,” the boy says warily. He casts the light onto Brienne and Celia to Jaime’s left, and narrows his eyes. “Is that a _woman_?” he suddenly asks, incredulous.

“She is a knight of the seven kingdoms,” Celia replies, leaping to her defense.

“A knight?” The boy sputters, and laughs. “Who in their right mind knighted _you_?”

“You will, lad,” Jaime says, rising up to his feet to clap him on the shoulder. He turns to offer Brienne a hand up. He hopes she can read the apology in his tight smile. “She’s the truest knight you’ll ever know.” She meets his eye and places her hand in his.

“I shall have to take your word for it,” the boy replies dryly as they all assemble before him. His eyes move to Jaime’s maimed arm, and he shakes his head. “Really, Cersei. An old woman, a squire, and a cripple. I shall have to teach you how to better select your own guard.”

“Never mind all this,” Jaime says, moving them back to the matter at hand. “Elia and the children. I mean it. We will help you get them out of here before your father sacks the city.”

The boy leads them from the room quickly, hearing that. Jaime knew that he would. The words would have been a weight off his shoulders, back then: _we will help you._

Out of the tunnels and dungeons, the Red Keep is still strangely quiet. He’d forgotten the bareness of the place in these final days: guards dismissed, courtiers fled, servants cowering. They pass a window, though, and he hears it: the unmistakeable noise of a pillaging army. Hooves pound. Metal sings. Fires crackle. Women scream. It is all happening so fast.

“Jaime,” he says. What an odd thing, to call yourself to attention. The boy spins to look at them all from his position at the head of the party. It’s then, as the boy locks eyes with his future self, that a realization that something is amiss spread across his face. Not just the sacking, outside, but that these strangers are hiding something. He looks at Dianna, then, and takes a jolting step back to look at her again.

He draws his sword. “Who are you people? What is this?”

“There isn’t time for this, lad,” Jaime says, raising his hand and arm in surrender. He desperately doesn’t want to say what he is about to say, but he knows there is no other way. “The Lannister Army is already in the city. There are other things you need to attend to. I know the king is making you more alarmed than he ever has, these past few days. I know you don’t like the look of the new pyromancer hand. But your place is there, in the throne room, more than ever.”

The boy’s face falls, just a crack, at that. He hates it there. Jaime knows.

“Who are you?” he asks again, his voice shaking, barely a whisper.

“Can’t you tell, lad?” Jaime says. “I am _you_.”

He stares. First at his face. And then at his missing hand. Jaime smiles sadly at him. _It will be worth it_ , he wants to say.

“You must go,” he tells the boy. “It is the most important thing you’ll ever do. Remember your vows.”

“Yes, yes. To defend the king from all who seek to cast him down.” His voice is bitter, seething with rage.

“No,” Jaime says softly. “To protect the innocent.”

The boy staresagain. He swallows. And he nods.Did he know, even then, what he would do? Jaime doesn’t remember any of this conversation, but then again, the whole night always felt like a dream, a tumble of surreal images, and then it was something he tried never to think of, at all.

The boy turns then, toward the throne room, and he runs.

As the boy’s footsteps fade, the three women from Jaime’s own time all stare at him, eyes wide in their own individual disbelieving ways. He doesn’t say anything just then; he just holds their gaze for a moment.

It is time. He strides toward the inner courtyards, for the footbridge that will take him to those who he is meant to save, at last.

* * *

  
No one guards the bridge leading to the Holdfast. Jaime knows that this will be the case before they even reach it. All the city guard who haven’t defected are out fighting his father’s men, and the only kingsguard left is busy spilling royal blood and becoming the Kingslayer. 

It is too easy for them to dash across the spike-filled moat into the darkened castle, Brienne and Celia clanging along and Dianna dragging behind. Someone should have pulled up the bridge to keep Rhaegar’s family safe. The Holdfast could quickly be made into an impregnable fortress, even if the rest of the Keep fell. That someone forgot, or simply did not care what happened to them. Maybe that someone was supposed to be Ser Jaime Lannister, now preoccupied.

He allows everyone to catch their breath once inside. Only a handful of the available torches still burn; these chambers are as deserted and barren as the rest that they’ve seen. All three of the others look to him expectantly, assuming he will lead them. This is his quest, after all. But Jaime has been so preoccupied with getting here that he didn’t plan for what came next.

Dianna the scholar saves them. She remembers that Elia and the babe were taken from the nursery, and the princess from her father’s empty bedchambers one floor up. So it is to the fourth floor that he leads them, up dim and silent spiral stairs.

No one is there. The nursery door is wide open, cribs devoid of any children at all. They peek into room after room, finding strewn clothing and bedclothes, or unmade rooms where no one had slept in ages. Where had all the ladies-in-waiting gone? The servants? Perhaps they cowered in wardrobes or among heads of garlic in the storerooms. Perhaps they had all gone long ago.

In a flash, Brienne raises her hand to stop their procession. She tilts her head, listening. He doesn’t hear it. All he hears is the pounding of his own heart and the rumbling of the city under attack in the distance.

“Hello?” she calls. “Who’s there?” No one replies. But she inches slowly toward the staircase at the other end of the corridor. “There’s no need to be alarmed,” she says in a gentler voice, a woman’s calming voice that he was always surprised to hear her possess when they first met. “We’re here to help.”

From around the corner, a woman peeks out. Her delicate, olive-skinned features are tight with fear and weariness, and she wears only a linen nightdress and a thin silken robe, nothing on her feet. Still, she walks toward them regally, holding a sleeping child in her arms like a scepter. Elia Martell, even in this dire hour, a princess leading a royal procession.

“How?” Elia asks. She stops suddenly and does not move closer, her eyes resting suspiciously on Brienne’s lion-handled sword. She takes a step back and holds the babe tighter. “You cannot trick me. I know whose side you are on. I will not surrender to you willingly.”

“Princess,” Jaimesays then. Her eyes snap to his, startled. “Please trust us. We will guard you as you flee this castle. We are on no side but yours. We are here on behalf of Ser Jaime of the Kingsguard.” Elia had always liked him, even pitied him as they both became hostages in all but name after Rhaegar’s death. He hopes she still regards him well after he all but abandoned her as his family’s men destroyed the city while it slept.

“I need to find my daughter first,” she finally says. As they follow her to the stairs, there is a loud crash. Men’s voices ring out, swearing loudly. This is it, Jaime thinks. They’ve scaled the walls and they’ve come to dash Rhaegar’s family’s heads against the stones.

Brienne draws her sword and they continue up the steps. They are taking them quickly, but each step feels bogged down, like racing through a running stream against the current.They cannot move fast enough.

Before they can reach the top, an ugly sound: a child’s scream, piercing, keening, pure in its high-pitched terror.

It is but a second. Elia turns to face them, her face pale but certain.

She hands Dianna the child, who only has begun to stir at his sister’s cries. Her eyes meet Jaime’s, and for a moment, he thinks she recognizes him.

She turns from them then and runs up the stairs.

“No!” Brienne shouts, pressing forward after her. Jaime leaps forward to restrain her with both arms, pressing his hand to her mouth to quiet her. He knows he only has a moment of surprise to keep her there. On the floor above, he hears muffled shouts, a woman’s yelp, a terrible crack.

“The prince,” he says, urgently, in her ear. “We have to save the prince.”

She relents and falls back, her sword lowered to her side.

Again they run, back the way they came, this time with all three swords at the ready and a precious child in their midst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, folks, wouldn’t be a GoT/Dark mashup without some accidental incest. And yes, Jaime, that is how everyone else feels.


	7. The Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He kicks at a stone and it tumbles into the hole she’s dug before them. “I thought we were changing things. I thought that we would avoid that war and save King’s Landing.”
> 
> She looks up at him. “Without all that happened, we wouldn’t be who we are,” she says. “We wouldn’t have Dianna. And you would not be here. It was terrible in many ways, but still I would not change anything.”
> 
> He knows she is right. She is always right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Behold: more plot. And emotional minefields that I cursed myself for creating and then having to resolve!

The Keep falls. Men stream in on horseback, swords aloft. The air smells like blood and dirt and battle lust.

The four of them cower underground away from all of it, in a tunnel that Celia and Dianna know from years back. “It leads out into the city,” Dianna says sheepishly to Brienne as she leads them to it, as this was the time to worry about about youthful indiscretions. Well, except for one. Jaime swallows to keep the thought of itdown.

For now, everyone above is preoccupied. They are conquering and fighting back. They are killing and plotting and finding a babe to murder instead of the one Jaime’s daughter now holds in her arms. The child hasn’t made a sound as they wind down the dark path, dodging around countless barrels of wildfire. He barely opens his eyes. Perhaps Elia gave him something to keep him asleep during the fighting.

Eventually they descend to a place so deep that they can no longer hear the hooves of horses pound above them. “How long until they come to clear all this out?” Brienne asks him, gesturing around to the barrels that crowd their path.

“Days, if they even realize that anything is even here. They’ve got a throne to worry about. We’re safer here than anywhere up there right now.”

As the day breaks over the ruined city, they tuck themselves amongst the wildfire and try to sleep. Brienne takes first watch, ambling down the passage ahead of them in complete darkness. Celia is out almost instantly, her light snores echoing softly around them. Jaime rests back against the rough stone wall and tried in vain to sleep. Instead he sees the glint of Dianna’s eyes in the dark, staring straight ahead as she cradles the babe to her chest. He wonders if he’s saved one child but lost another.

After a long while he gives in. It is not the time nor the place, but he is not sure there ever will truly be one. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “He—I—he thought you were Cersei. If he had known—“

“Please, let’s never speak of it,” Dianna says quietly. “Or her. I hate her.”

The rage is for his twin, but he feels it sting as though it is meant for him. Perhaps it is, and this is the only way she feels comfortable voicing it. “You’re certainly not the first, nor the last. But ask yourself, is it really her with whom you quarrel?”

“They said she was a great beauty, but to bear her likeness has been nothing but a curse,” Diann spits. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s why _she_ denied me: because she couldn’t bear to look upon my face.”

Jaime takes that blow, too, straight to his gut. “I doubt that very much. It’s not her way.”

“Do you really know what’s her way, anymore? You’ve barely spoken to her since we’ve been back. There’s plenty about Brienne that you don’t know.”

Is that true or is she just being cruel, finally taking aim at the thing she really wishes to fight? He sighs and decides to put it out of his mind for the moment. “I suppose we cannot truly know anyone. But please know that I don’t see my sister when I see you. I see only you. And I’m surely not alone in feeling that way.”

She closes her eyes then and pretends to be asleep. Jaime does too, because there’s naught else that he could do.

He’s just drifted off when he’s jolted awake to the sound of rattling metal and racing, heavy footfalls on the stone. He stands up and grabs his sword.

“Someone’s coming,” Brienne says in a harsh whisper. “We have to move.”

“To where?” Dianna asks, still awake. “We can’t go back to the Red Keep right now. Best get your swords out, heroes.”

Celia pokes her head out from behind a barrel, squinting. “What’s going on?”

“Be quiet,” Brienne hisses, looking back over her shoulder. Jaime follows her eyes: it’s barely visible, but he can see it—a small circle of orange light, bobbing toward them.

“Dianna’s right,” he tells her quietly. “Let’s you and I go to them and leave Celia here to take watch.”

The light stops moving as he and Brienne make their way towards it. She is a fearsome warrior, a sight on the battlefield, but stealth is not among her many talents. Their approach is obvious, echoing through the quiet tunnel.

“There is nothing to fear but darkness,” a smooth voice calls out.

 _Of course there isn’t_. “Is that because it is full of terrors?”

The light is now in front of his face, blinding. “Well met, Ser Jaime,” says the woman holding it, her arms draped in a flowing red gown.

Brienne raises her sword to the woman’s face.

She just laughs.

“I see you found your knight,” another woman says from the shadows.

“And the prince!” another cries fervently. “He will bring us into the light.”

“How many of you are there?” Jaime asks. The woman holding the light smiles.

“We come to aid the prince.” Her eyes glitter in the lamplight. “We will show him how to lead.”

“In the name of R’hllor,” they whisper. The sounds close in on him like slow-moving flames. _What they want is not right._

“You assume that we will give him to you,”Jaime says. Brienne re-grips her sword but does not lower it.

The woman is not able to answer. Her eyes grow wide. Her hands fly to her throat. Gasping, she scratches, unable to even cough audibly.

The lantern falls from her grasp as she collapses to the ground. All around him are the sickening sounds of bones hitting the stone and limbs writhing on the ground.

Out of the chaos a figure slinks toward them. She wears her gray hair loose and curling past her shoulders. She lifts the lantern from the ground and the flame grows brighter.

“I have been looking forward to meeting you, Ser Jaime,” she says, her face serious and urgent. He remembers her then: from Isle of Fire, stealing him away in the night.

“Haven’t we already met?”

“For you,” she says. She looks at Brienne’s sword with amusement. “Come. You won’t be needing that just now. Gather the others. The quest awaits.”

* * *

  
It’s hard to trust a woman when she beckons you to walk over the corpses of several people she just killed without lifting a finger. It’s also hard to trust a woman when she commands you to climb up from a deep underground tunnel using a very long rope ladder of unclear age and provenance, but doesn’t volunteer to go first.

Yet, they all follow her, because Jaime follows her. He’s now Lord Commander of this mysterious expedition, despite the fact that he can barely hold on to the ladder. He is one wobble away from knocking The Prince Who Was Promised from where he is tied to Dianna’s chest with what was once the bottom half of the priestess’s dress.

Brienne is the first to get to the surface, and she reaches back to pull him the last few steps into the blinding sunlight. He squints around as the others come crashing aboveground behind him: they’ve emerged into a small cobblestoned square, littered with broken pottery and splintered wood. Despite the rumbling sounds of marauding men in the distance, they are met only with silence. A man’s body lies halfway out of a shop door, eyes blankly staring at the sky.

“The army won’t be back.” The priestess clasps her hands in front of her and settles back on her heels to watch them “Take what you need. A last gift from the dead.”

Celia is the first to take up the challenge. She walks with determination into one of the buildings, the wooden door swinging loudly behind her. Brienne follows suit, advancing slowly and reverently into the next shop over, her hand lingering softly on the stone of the doorframe before she enters.

Dianna has her sights on something across the square, almost out of sight around a corner. Jaime grips the hilt of his sword and stays behind her. To protect the prince, of course, but also to protect her.

The sign above the door reads _Apothecary_ , and inside it smells of cedarwood and mint. No bodies lay outside or in; the proprietors must have fled or gotten cut down on their way to or from the wares.

Dianna unwraps the babe from her chest and turns to him. “If you’re going to shadow me, at least make yourself useful,” she says, pushing the child at him.

He grips at him clumsily with his elbows and one hand. It has been ages since he’s held a babe, and never with just the one hand. He’s forgotten how heavy they can be. Little Aegon gazes up at him placidly for a moment, then screws up his entire face and begins to wail. Jaime looks at Dianna for help, but she’s already scaling a ladder along the shelves on the wall, gathering bottles and tins in her arms and under her chin.

“Just bounce him up and down, or something,” she calls down to him. “Say something to him in a soothing tone. You know how it goes.”

“I really don’t,” Jaime says, more to the babe than her. But her advice does work, at least partly: a little movement distracts the child enough to reduce his cries to a hiccup. _Gods, we are going to have to care for a child now_ , Jaime thinks. He had been so consumed by the rush of the quest and the need to rescue the child that the practicalities of what came after hadn’t been in his mind at all.

“You unlucky lad,” Jaime says to him as he sways back and forth. “You have a big mysterious destiny and you’re stuck with this unprepared band of rogues instead.” He wanders along the shelves opposite Dianna and surveys the rows of clay jars. “Do you see anything that you need? Tinctures? Salves? I’m not quite sure what supplies are required to ‘bring us into the light.’ Maybe we should ask our friend in red out there.”

Aegon just looks at him with wide eyes, and then bursts into tears again. Jaime starts up with the bouncing again. He spends what seems like an eternity pacing back and forth in front of the shelf-lined room with the very irate child, who takes comfort in absolutely nothing he says.

“I’m done!” Dianna announces, finally. She has another bundle of mysteries tied up around her shoulder like when they ran from Volantis all those months ago. He tries to hand the babe back to her but she puts her hand up. “My arms are full.”

When they rejoin the others in the square, the priestess is standing next to a gray horse, running her hand softly down his flank. A cart is fixed to his harness and Celia and Brienne rest on the end, a pile of bundles at their back and very stern expressions on their faces.

“Where the fuck did this horse come from?” Jaime asks.

Brienne shrugs, gesturing back toward the red woman with a tilt of her head. The priestess smiles cryptically.

“This is where I leave you. Until we meet again.”

* * *

They attract no attention as they ride out of the city. Jaime was sure they would, with Brienne on the horse, taller than most men and wearing her gleaming gold Kingsguard armor. But when he volunteered himself, she looked down at his missing hand with a pointed glance.

“I ride horses all the time!”

“Those horses do not have a cart attached. Just get in so we can go.”

And thus he ended up here, in a cart pulled by Brienne of Tarth. Sitting next to a squire in love with his daughter shooting him violent glares, a daughter avoiding his gaze, and a royal babe, snoozing under a blanket. Dianna has mixed up a solution from roots and elixirs for him to drink, and the babe had finally quieted. Small mercies, at least.

The city writhed in a state of distress as they passed through the short distance left. Women comforted crying children on street corners. Bloodied men stared around, eyes focusing on nothing at all. It was amidst this that they rolled out of the city gates, and no one gave them a second glance, not even the weary soldiers posted as lookouts whose eyes struggled to stay open.

They ride steady on the worn road out of King’s Landing. The sun sinks below the horizon, and Jaime bumps along in the silence among sacks of what smells like bread and wool. Brienne must be exhausted; she’s been awake all through the blue hours of the night and had a full day of who knows what back in their own time, too.

He knows she will not stop, though. She will ride on past the point where her body is ready to collapse. She will ride on as her eyes itch and her stomach rumbles. She will ride in the pitch black night, until the city and its dangers lie far enough behind them.

 _Stubborn wench_ , he thinks. But he’s grateful, too.

Their entourage is winding through a patch of forest he doesn’t remember when he convinces her to rest.

“Here,” he says. “It’s well past nightfall and it won’t be wise to just keep going. We can cover the wagon with branches and—“

“That’s an excellent idea!” Celia calls out pointedly.

Under the cover of the dark, they finally slow down. They hobble the horse. They collect wood for a small fire. They lay out pilfered bedding and disguise the cart with fallen lengths of tree. Then, there is silence.

Celia moves to the perimeter, ready to survey for potential threats. Dianna feeds the babe, swaddles him in fresh cloth, and curls around him, back to the waning fire.

“Where do you think we should go?” Brienne asks him. Her voice is as low as the embers in front of them. Her eyes linger on Dianna’s resting form, the tattoo on her neck peeking out through her golden hair.

“Sleep,” he replies. “That’s a question for the morrow.”

When dawn breaks, and she blinks her blue eyes open again, it’s the first question on her lips. Jaime and Celia are packing up the camp, any rancor buried in service of duty. Dianna rests on a stone bouncing a fussy Aegon on her lap.

“Leaving, are we? Have we decided on a destination?” She sits up and rubs the sleep from her face.

“The safest thing would be to go back to the future and bring him with us,” Jaime says, handing her a skin of water.

Celia puts a rolled blanket into the cart. “But, that’s out of the question, what with themultiple armies in the capital right now. Ser.”

“Has he any allies in this time that would shelter him?”

Jaime remembers a vengeful man, resplendent in his coiled golden rage, spinning a spear. _Say her name! Elia Martell!_

“Dorne,” he says. “He has family in Dorne.”

She nods. “Then we ride for Dorne.”

* * *

Aerys may be defeated, but the loose ends of war hang everywhere. Their route by necessity must be long and indirect. Between him and Brienne, they know the roads, both main and hidden, well enough. They bicker about the best path to take and it makes him smile.

In the days that come, they fall into a routine. They wake. They pack. They ride. They camp. They sleep. They wake. Jaime finds comfort in the repetition and the winding march south. The mess of relations with his traveling companions, made worse by their travels under the Red Keep and by the unsaid past, dissolve into simplicity. They work together. They feed the babe and hunt small game. They light fires and care for the horse. They are a regiment. They are a team. They are comrades, and it is easy and natural.

In the evenings, as the sun slides out of view, Dianna and Celia disappear for long stretches to collect firewood. Sometimes they don’t come back with nearly enough wood for the time they’ve spent away, and Jaime has to hold back his laughter at Brienne’s stern disappointed face.

One night, the moon is rising before they return, and Jaime gives up pretense and starts the fire on his own.

“Perhaps we should give them a different task,” Brienne says, frowning.

He laughs. He can’t tell if she is actually blind to what’s going on or just willfully so. “I think they rather prefer this one. Gets them away from us, for instance.”

She pokes a thin twig into the flames and into the hot embers at its center. “Speak for yourself. They’ve already forgiven you. You tell some war stories and make some jokes and everything is all right. With me, it’s a different thing. It’s not the same between us. With Dianna, especially. She’s angry with me. She barely speaks to me now.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” Jaime says. “She’ll understand why you lied to her, in time. It’s not as if you did it for no reason. She just needs to get used to the idea.” _I know, and I’m glad_ , Myrcella had said.

“It feels sometimes as if I did it for no reason. The king always knew, and he took no issue. After a few years, there was much less danger for her from others. But too much time had passed, and it seemed crueler to speak the truth than to maintain the lie. She lifts the twig, the end translucent red and glowing. “I used to want to ask you. I used to wonder how you could bear it.”

He stares into the fire and shakes his head. “I wouldn’t have wished it on you. I’m sorry. I know you...would have wanted to make your own way. You swore an oath to bear no children when you joined the Kingsguard.” _You should have been able to choose it_ , he thinks. _Perhaps one day_ , she’d said, lying beside him in Winterfell, when he asked if she wanted her own family.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” she says. He swallows and says nothing.

“Your brother is fond of pointing out that when I joined, the rule still technically was to father no children, and therefore, I had broken no vow.” She laughs a little there, wry and nervous. “I did worry about being a poor example, at first. But that is not what I meant. The king doesn’t make his Kingsguard swear for life. Just for seven years, and then you’re free to take your leave. He says that in the overall history of the realm that the requirement of lifetime celibacy wasn’t taken seriously. Men either fathered bastards or joined because they had ulterior motives in appearing abstinent.” _Like fucking the queen? Causing civil war with your three bastard children, for example?_

“And yet you chose to anyway.”

“No,” she says. “I left too, for a time. To marry, and begin a family.”

Jaime tries very hard not to react to that. He has no right to anything that he’s feeling: he didn’t stay, and as far as she knew, he didn’t live. She is no longer his to claim, and she didn’t deserve to go through her days alone. But still, he realizes now, on hearing the words, how much he had been comforted by the idea of her in the white cloak, untouchable.

He needn’t have worried about his reaction. She is looking resolutely away from him anyway.

“I took her with me,” she continues, speaking into the fire. “We were away from the court for two whole years. And still I didn’t tell her. She was one-and-ten. Old enough to understand. And yet I could not do it.”

She looks and sounds so distraught, and he wants to rub her back and whisper soothing words. He wants to comfort her, but instead, because he cannot help himself, he asks: “Who was he?”

“A knight of the Vale. Ser Roland Waynwood? You may have met him; he was closer to your age. He came to court often with Lord Arryn when we were negotiating getting stone from his quarries to rebuild the Keep. He was a man of honor, and kind, and when he asked me for my hand, I accepted. My father was thrilled.”

He doesn’t remember Ser Roland. Those Knights of the Vale love to duel with sad little rapiers and sit around polishing their armor. He pictures Brienne knocking him into the dirt in the practice yard. “You speak of him in past tense. Did you grow tired of him? Push him out the Moon Door?” Her face twists and he regrets being so glib.

“He was lost in battle,” she says simply, tapping her scarred cheek. “A Dothraki cut his head clean off. I saw it across the field. After we returned his bones home, I took Dianna and came back to King’s Landing. King Brandon offered me my place at his side again. It was like none of it ever happened. No husband, no castle, no heirs. And here we are.”

Her voice is steady, but he knows her well enough to know the effort she’s using to make it so. _No one should ever have to see that happen to someone they care for,_ he thinks.

“I bet they loved you in the Vale,” he offers after a few moments of silence.

She smiles, a small one. “Some did.” Then Dianna and her squire return, pleading an accidental slumber. The moment gives way to routine.

* * *

Near the Westerlands, four weeks since they escaped from the war in the streets of King’s Landing, the journey begins to wear on them. The dried foods they had brought with them are nearly gone. Brienne scolds Celia about packing up too slowly in the morning, and Jaime has to mediate; he cowers at her very indignant gaze. Little Aegon cries with more confidence at all hours of the day. Dianna glowers at everything, even passing trees.

The weather turns sour, too. The skies are dim and gray. The winds rumble during the day and at night they are wild, cutting and cold. In the mornings they wake slightly damp and the air hangs heavy around them wet with mist.

On the fourth day of this, in the waning light of early evening, it finally happens: rain, thick and cold and miserable. Brienne keeps looking back in their direction, not at Jaime but at Dianna and the babe, both hunkered under damp blankets.

Ahead, in the distance, a quaint stone building sits at a crossroads. When she sees it, Brienne looks back again. This time she does look at Jaime, and he nods back.

Tonight, they will stop there.

Mud splatters up on the sides of the cart as they ride up toward the inn. Jaime can feel it dripping from his hair and down his back. Candles glow warmly in the window, so close and yet so far away.

They pull up to the stables, a small and rough wooden building just behind the main one. It looks like it could barely hold one horse. Not much noise sounds from within; despite the weather, it appears to be a quiet night for business here.

And yet, outside the door, sitting in the mud, water soaking his back and his dripping long hair, is a man. He holds his face in his hands. At the sound of their horse and cart, he lifts his head and glances at them, a defeated glazed over look in his eyes.

Jaime draws in a sharp breath. Not at the darkness in the man’s face, which he recognizes well enough, but at the man. Even though he lacks the tall righteousness that he carried into the throne room, as Jaime waited for someone to come and claim it, he cannot deny who this is.

This man, broken in the mud, is Ned Stark. Lord of Winterfell. Warden of the North.

Stark sees the recognition dawning on Jaime’s face. He smiles tightly. “I apologize,” he says. “You look familiar, as well, but I cannot quite place you.”

Jaime raises his maimed arm. “A veteran of our most recent war,” he replies. “We rode with House Webber. Lord Stark.” He can feel everyone else in their party turn to look at the man at that.

“Is the inn full?” Brienne manages to ask.

Stark shakes his head and leans it back to rest on the stable wall for moment, eyes closed. “Not in the slightest. They’ve asked me to stay out here. I’m with...I have my...my child is ill, and they fear I might spread it to their patrons.”

His child. Jon Snow. Well, at least it isn’t fatal, whatever he has.

Brienne seems to have the same thought. “We have with us a skilled healer,” she offers. “Perhaps she could have a look.”

Stark stands at that. He sways on his feet a little and has to catch the wall for balance. The man has likely run himself ragged, spreading honor all over Westeros—installingKing Robert, liberating Storm’s End, collecting his bastard from his indifferent or possibly tragically dead mother.

Brienne dismounts and walks toward him. “My lord, perhaps you should rest.” He shakes his head.

“You’ll be no use to the child like this,” she insists. He turns from her and walks into the stable. Brienne looks to Jaime for help. He groans inwardly. Stubborn Ned Stark, tormenting him again across the reaches of time.

“She’s right,” Jaime says, following him out of the rain. Stark’s gray horse leans against the back wall and stares at them morosely. “Let our healer look after the babe. No harm will come to him. I swear it as a comrade in arms.”

He sighs and rubs his face. “The child,” he says, finally. “The child is over there.” He gestures to a mound of straw opposite the horse.

“Come on,” Jaime says to him, steering him by the arm paternalistically. “The inn won’t turn away the Warden of the North. And you look well enough to me. Well, in body, at least.” Stark doesn’t laugh. Stark never laughs, though, so Jaime doesn’t take it personally.

As he predicted, the inn cannot turn away the Warden of the North, though the short and wrinkled innkeeper looks like he desperately wants to. “I do apologize,” Jaime says. “I thought you were running a business here? Perhaps I was mistaken. My companions and I do not fear whatever illness he supposedly has, and I doubt none of your other nonexistent patrons do either.”

Stark pays for them both. Jaime tried to refuse, but the man gruffly waves him off, and he’s both touched and ashamed. He will pay him back by crippling his son and killing his guards in the streets. He wishes, briefly, that he could take it all back.

The wrinkled innkeep leads them upstairs to their rooms. At his door, Stark turns to him.

“You ride with a woman,” he says, a hint of a smile on his face. “Tywin Lannister cannot be pleased about having her among his banners.”

He would not be. Jaime would have been thrilled to see it. “He does not yet know,” he replies, “but he’d be a fool to object.”

* * *

The stables are dimly lit, just one torch against the darkness. When Jaime enters, everyone is huddled in the center of the cramped interior, between two very tensed-up horses and a pile of sodden, smelly wool.

Dianna is bent over Ned’s bastard in the straw. Beside her is a pile of bloody rags. He is taken aback: perhaps it is worse than they thought. Infant Jon Snow is quiet, unlike their own charge, who wails unceasingly across the room.

“How is he?” he asks her. She looks up at him and her eyes are sorrowful.

He bends down and puts his arm around her, his hand firm on her shoulder. “He’ll be all right. We know he will be. I’ve met him as a man grown.”

“His breathing is slow,” she says, “and he won’t take any of the drink.”

Jaime looks down at the babe. He looks pallid, but still strong and even large for a newborn. His hair is soft and light on his head, not unlike the young babe they’ve been carrying throughout the kingdom. It must grow darker as he grows.

“He will live,” Jaime says, again.

”There’s blood. A lot of it, in his clouts. It’s not the flux. It’s something else.” She turns away from the child to look up at him.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says, her voice breaking. “Can you tell me what to do?” She covers her face then and he wraps her into his arms as she tries to hold back tears.

Over her head, he meets Brienne’s eye. She holds little Aegon awkwardly to her own chest, his face turned away from the scene ahead of them. Her eyes are glassy and full of sorrow, too.

“We’ll find a way,” Jaime murmurs into her head. “This is Jon Snow.”

“What if he’s not?” Celia says from across the room. “What if...” Her eyes trail toward Brienne.

Dianna raises her tear-stained face to look at Little Aegon, too.

“That’s absurd,” Jaime says. “All babes look alike, but in time it will be clear that this child is a dragon and not a wolf.”

“Well,” Brienne says slowly, looking down at the babe she holds, “they are brothers.”

“What?”

Dianna laughs then. “You don’t know. Of course you don’t. Jon Snow wasn’t Ned’s bastard. He’s his nephew. Lyanna’s child.”

“With Rhaegar,” he says, looking down at the child, trying to comprehend. Dianna nods. Of course he was. A bastard was not really Honorable Ned’s style. He should have seen it. He was just so eager to see a flaw in that pristine man. He probably wasn’t the only one.

Another prince. Damn you, Ned Stark.

“Will Stark protect a child not of his own blood, just because we ask him to? After we cannot save the child of his departed sister? It’s one thing to commit treason for your own family. It’s another to do it for no reason.”

“He doesn’t have to know,” Celia says, softly. “He wouldn’t guess. And the babe’s mother was dark. In time, he may look like he fits in.”

This is madness. Jaime looks at Brienne, hoping she’ll back him up. But she says nothing—just looks pensively down at the child in her arms.

In that moment, he knows that it will work. Because it already has.

Dianna comforts Lyanna’s child through the night. She wraps him in a dry cloth and brushes a tender hand across his brow. She tips a few drops of the feed into his mouth, but he barely swallows. Soon, his breathing stops altogether. Dianna’s wail is deep and shakes her body. It frightens little Aegon—soon to be Jon Snow, the madness—and he joins her in anguish.

Jaime pulls the unmoving babe from Dianna’s arms. He can feel no breath and no pulse at his throat. Dianna reaches for him again, but Celia pulls her back, and Dianna sobs into her chest instead.

Jaime carries the babe out of the stables and into the night. His body is still warm. It’s difficult to believe that he’s dead. They should lay him out. Place stones over his eyes. The little prince who would not be one.

Was this the point of it all? To steal away Elia’s babe in the night so Ned Stark could raise him in the North? So he could join the Night’s Watch, leave it, and then return to the frozen wall again? He’d imagined a different future for the child. Sometimes, as he slept by the fire, he imagined a different future for them all. The child would come of age with Oberyn, who wouldn’t perish from his desire from revenge from the Mountain. Myrcella would live. Maybe she would marry Aegon instead, and he would take the throne from Tommen. Jaime would convince his father to negotiate it peacefully. Cersei would have to marry Loras, and she’d be miserable, but she and her son would live. Jaime could go north to fight the dead, with an army this time. Maybe he’d take a warrior bride, to appease his father, and they would lead the troops to fight the dead together. In this future, he would not leave her, and she would not see her husband beheaded on a battlefield.

Of course, none of that could ever be. It sounded as absurd as anything else, each time he thought of it.

A hand falls firm on his shoulder. He turns, though he knows who it is. Brienne.

“We should bury the child,” she says quietly, “if this is to have any hope of working.”

“It’ll work. It already has.”

In the light rain, under the cover of stars, Brienne digs a small grave in the soft earth behind the stables with just her hands and a sharp stone. Jaime stands at her side, holding the still child, contributing nothing.

“I just,” he begins. “I cannot accept that this was the true end. What was the point of it all? All this so he can get us to defend Winterfell? So he can kill his aunt and go live out his days in the frozen North?” He kicks at a stone and it tumbles into the hole she’s dug before them. “I thought we were changing things. I thought that we would avoid that war and save King’s Landing.”

She looks up at him. “Without all that happened, we wouldn’t be who we are,” she says. “We wouldn’t have Dianna. And you would not be here. It was terrible in many ways, but still I would not change anything.”

He knows she is right. She is always right.

They cover the child with earth, and Brienne says a quiet prayer to the Mother into the darkness.

In the morning, a better-rested Ned Stark does not suspect a thing. He is surprised by the child’s recovery and thanks a tired-eyed Dianna profusely. The innkeep looks embarrassed, as he certainly should.

“Please give our regards to your lady wife,” Brienne says, stiffly but with more feeling than Stark can probably recognize. His face falls a little at her words. The next time he sees his lady wife, he will have to explain his new bastard child, and she will definitely not feel much regard.

But he nods. He takes the skin of the concoction to feed the child from Dianna, and then he rides off with the babe who will become Jon Snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In both Dark and GoT, there is a character called The Stranger. In Dark, it is a man from the future, playing a role analogous to Jaime’s here. In GoT, The Stranger is the God of Death and patron of those on the margins of life. Both are present here, along with some literal strangers: the man they meet at the stables, and the child he takes away with him unknowingly at the end.


	8. The Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Ser Jaime,” the person says, laughing a painful laugh. “I knew it would be you.”
> 
> “You did? I’m afraid I don’t know you.” He feels for their wound with his good hand. There must be a lot of blood for it to have seeped through that wool.
> 
> “A pity,” the person says. “I’ve known you practically all my life. You taught me how to swing a sword.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Behold: the ship that was promised! Also some dad jokes and a side of mortal peril.

“I don’t remember this many bandits on the road here,” Brienne says, pulling her sword from a man’s gut. It’s the sixth man she’s killed in half as many days. Jaime is starting to feel sorry for them. Whatever they expect to find when they attack, it isn’t three castle-trained swordsmen and Valyrian steel. They are woefully unprepared.

But Brienne is right: the road wasn’t like this when they left King’s Landing, and they were even more conspicuous then, toting a wagon high with tempting bags of food and supplies. He wonders if the red women were on their trail and slaying the bandits for them. Or maybe it was just the one, who seemed more useful than the rest. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them, though, so he couldn’t be sure.

Dianna spots the broken-down cottage when they come in range of the Stormlands. The family who lived there has been gone for a long time: the roof is almost entirely blown off, the small yard around it is overgrown, and the stone walls are weathered and chipped.

“We won’t be easy prey here,” she points out. Brienne must be tired of having to bury several surprised thieves every day; she nods, reluctantly.

“Just for the night,” she says.

The cottage has two rooms: one for sleeping, and one for everything else, it seems. They pick their way around broken pottery and spread their bedrolls over a carpet of dry twigs that once had been fresh rushes. Jaime volunteers for the first watch. Above him, in a hole in what used to be the roof, he can see the sky and feel the cool night breeze waft in. Summer. It’s been so long.

Everyone sleeps soundly that night. They wake uneventfully, too.

* * *

  
No one makes a hard call to stay on longer in the cottage. They simply agree that they could use another night away from the open road, and then another, and then Brienne is musing that it wouldn’t be a good idea for them to draw attention to themselves by leaving a trail of bodies all the way to King’s Landing, anyway. 

They spend these first few days more domestically than any of them probably ever have done. Celia finds a broom and sweeps out the cottage. Brienne collects all the dishes and cleans the most unbroken of them for their use. Dianna lines up what is leftover from her trip to the apothecary on a small bare shelf.

For his part, Jaime attempts to catch rabbits to cook for supper. He fails miserably the first night, stumbling back with nothing but cuts on his hand. Brienne sends Celia with him on his next attempt. She’s embarrassingly good at it: she snags three without really even trying.

“You can thank me with a good turn with our swords later,” she says as she skins the rabbits for roasting.

The rabbits crackle merrily on the spit in the hearth, and they spar outside with long, sturdy sticks, at Brienne’s insistence. Celia wins easily, as he’d predicted: she is young, and full of energy, and she also has an excellent teacher. She offers her hand to lift him out of the dirt, smiling smugly.

Brienne serves them all a plate of roasted meat and a small cup of wine that night. She raises her glass to them, a quick toast without words. He holds her gaze as he touches his cup to hers, and she doesn’t look away. Jaime wants to forget all about the map of the tunnels under the keep, tucked snugly in the pocket of the jacket he no longer really wears.

* * *

  
It doesn’t take long for Dianna and Celia to start making excuses to spend their days away from the cottage. Dianna needs an escort to town, to see if she can barter some medicine for things they need. There might be news to hear in the nearest tavern, and they stand out the least of all. Celia is going to help Dianna work on her swordwork. That last one is too much even for Brienne, who responds only with a single raised eyebrow.

Jaime doesn’t make too much of a fuss. Dianna is the happiest he’s seen her when she comes back after a day off gallivanting by the squire’s side. Since the barn at the inn and the child who wasn’t really Jon Snow, she often slips into a listless stare when she thinks no one is watching. A pile of one thing on top of another. If he asked her if she was all right she always said yes and then busied herself with something that didn’t involve him. Like her mother that way. But when she comes back after being with Celia, she smiles easily. She even offers to help Brienne collect firewood and tend to the horse. 

And when they are both gone, Jaime is alone with Brienne.

She has a routine of her own, already, just like she did at Winterfell. She wakes at dawn and breaks her fast silently, cataloging her tasks for the day. Then she cleans everything up, her space pristine, as if she never had grown up with servants picking up after her. She gets right down to work, takes another focused midday meal break, practices her swordwork just out of sight, and then briskly starts to prepare her evening, like she’s laying down camp for the night. He missed her routine and her steady commitment to it.

“Which of the many urgent duties around here are you adding to your list today?” he asks from the bedroom doorway. She already sits at the table with a mug of tea and a slice of bread, her boots laced up for the day ahead.

“Did you have something in mind that needs doing?” She looks so very serious.

“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing around here needs doing. We are squatters. All we need to do is squat.”

“You could do some drilling with your sword,” she points out. “Always good to practice.”

He doesn’t do any swordwork that day. He works on patching the roof with Brienne. He has no idea if it will hold, but Brienne thinks that a combination the dried-out rushes, mud, and tree limbs will keep out the elements.

“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,” he says, kneeling on the peak of the roof, a bowl of mud in his one hand. “That blasted golden hand would actually be useful right now—I could hang this bowl off it and spoon out the mud myself.”

“I think Tyrion has it,” she replies, not looking up from the branches she’s arranging. “You could ask him for it when we get back, if you want it.”

 _When we get back_. The phrase is innocuous but Jaime feels it like a slap. They haven’t discussed what the real plan is, yet. How long would they wait out the chaos of the end of the war? How long before this world they’ve created ends?

* * *

  
A storm hits them the next day, as they are repairing the fence near the horse’s pen and the two very irate chickens that Dianna and Celia managed to procure during one visit to town. It rolls in suddenly: the sun doesn’t even dim before big, thick raindrops start to pelt them in the face. 

They race inside the cottage. Cool water drips into his eyes and down the front of his shirt. Brienne heads straight for the hole in the roof of the bedroom that they’ve just fixed. She holds her hand up to check for leaks; when her mouth twitches up into a half-smile, he knows it held.

He joins her under the spot—looks up and raises his hand to check it too. “Good work, Ser,” he says. The room is dimmer now with a full roof, and the sounds of the water fallthick and heavy overhead. He looks Brienne in the eye then, rivulets of rain still running from her hair, over her cheeks and into the collar of her shirt. He wonders if she’s reminded too of the morning when they lay in bed together during a rainstorm, three days before he left,after she pulled the shutters closed to keep the floors dry. He had traced her face and her jaw in the darkness, all the way down to the dip of her collarbone where the rain water is pooling now.

“Brienne,” he starts.

She bites her lip but doesn’t move her eyes from his. She stares and she says nothing. Gods, to know what she is thinking.

“I know there are things between us that I can’t take back,” he says. “But I—“ _I always end up on your shores. When my life gets dashed on the rocks and I make to drift along until death comes for me, I always wash up to you, and I just want to stay there, for once._

He falters under her gaze, still penetrating and deep and unbearable. “I don’t know. It all comes back to you. I’ll be yours if you’ll have me.”

The first time Jaime wanted to kiss her, as he left her behind in that awful pink dress, he was certain she’d have punched him in response. The first time he did kiss her, in the glow of the fire in Winterfell, he still couldn’t believe she didn’t, even as she stood bare before him. Now, though, as he leans forward to take her lips with his own, he doesn’t care if she takes a swing at him afterwards. He deserves it, and he’ll bear the blows if it means he can just kiss her one more time first.

She doesn’t hit him. She just kisses him back.Her hands rest at his waist, soft and burning.

“I wanted to hate you, when I saw you at Storm’s End,” she says quietly as they finally part. “But all I could think of was how happy I was to see you. There were years where all I wanted was just to see you again.”

“I’m here now,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s a while before the rain stops and their daughter returns with her squire, and they savor every stolen minute.

* * *

Now they are the ones making excuses to go off together. Brienne needs help with the firewood. Brienne needs help catching some game for the evening meal. Brienne wants to practice her sword fighting. That day, he yields early, and slips his hand underneath her clothes, along the soft expanse of her skin, and they cross a line that they can’t come back from, in the lush grass on the side of a hill.

“Maybe we can give Dianna a little sister,” he jokes; they both know the time for that has long passed. “If we don’t like her, we can drop her off on Tarth and tell them to call her Brienne.” She rolls her eyes at that—a seven-year-old Brienne of Tarth exists already in this time—but she is laughing, too. Her laugh is a victory that Jaime forgot how much he likes to win.

For all the time they spent restoring that cottage, no one spends much time there. Dianna and Celia head off through the forest to the town, again, and they bathe in the nearest stream. He touches her with his fingers and his mouth as small fish nibble at their toes. At night he dreams that he took her on the riverbank, pressed down in the mud. He vows to actually do so in real life soon enough. It’s glorious to love in the sunshine, with no threats of anything hanging over their heads.

Then: they hear the news.

It is evening when Celia brings it up. She looks embarrassed.

“People are heading to the capital for the King’s wedding,” she says, halfway through their evening meal of potatoes and eggs. It all comes out in a rush. Dianna turns to her, that familiar look of rage overtaking her delicate features.

Brienne nods, slowly, thoughtfully.“There will be a lot of commotion. We would not attract any more attention than anyone else.”

“There was a lot of commotion the last time we were in the capital,” Jaime responds. “I did not feel particularly safe in that crowd.”

“It might be the best chance we have.”

“What’s the rush?” Dianna asks. “We don’t need to go back right away. What if there is more for us to do here?”

Brienne looks down at her food, spears a potato wedge on her fork, and shakes her head. “We saved the prince. Our duty here is done.”

* * *

  
“Who will care for the chickens now?” Dianna asks him, spreading grain in their pen. The wedding is in a fortnight. Brienne thinks they should leave within the week, just to give themselves enough time.

“Perhaps you should sell them, before we go,” Jaime tells her.

“Perhaps,” she says. She brushes the grain off her hands. “Nothing lasts, does it?”

“Not everything.”

“I like it here. No worries but my next meal. No future to contend with. I wish we could just make our way like this.”

“No one says you still can’t,” Jaime tells her. He wishes it too. How much simpler things would have been.

“It only works because no one knows who we are here,” she says. “I tried making my own way once, remember? Thwarted, those efforts. Perhaps I could marry some unwitting lord when we get back. Some old man about to die. Some man who likes his evenings in the whorehouse. Celia can pledge her sword to me and we can count down the days until I become a rich widow.”

His stomach twists a bit at that. _Stay in the Kingsguard, Jaime! Then you can always be at my side._

“It will kill whatever love you have,” he says after a moment. “You will have to bed him while she listens at your door. She will have to hear him humiliate you when he thinks no one is listening. Believe me when I say this: there is no future in living a lie.”

“No,” she says softly. “There isn’t.”

“Honestly, fuck all those bloody rules. You just saved the realm. Ask the King to legitimize you, and take one of our castles. The gods know we aren’t using them. Fill it with books. Students, even. Make a Citadel for women. Seven hells, why not? The maesters and septas have too much control over things anyway.”

“I asked Tyrion once,” Dianna says. “To legitimize me. He said the King felt it wasn’t time.”

“Well, it’s bloody well time now. You deserve it.”

She smiles, and surprises him by wrapping him into an embrace.

* * *

  
The time for their departure arrives. They are well-prepared for it. Dianna sold the chickens and the remainder of her medicines and got them a second mount. With two horses, and minimal stops, they should reach King’s Landing two days before Robert and Cersei’s official nuptials. One day before he took Cersei’s maidenhead in the inn. Jaime vows to avoid all inns. They bring nothing but trouble.

Still, their final night at the cottage takes them by surprise when it is upon them. They clear away their last makeshift meal and even wash their dishes, though they don’t intend to use them again. They sit at the table, reclining wistfully.

“Do you remember when Ser Brienne was worried about the horse outside, and Ser Jaime suggested she let it sleep in the kitchen if it would make her feel better?” Celia laughs.

“I still contend that he would make a good neigh-bor,” he replies, trying and failing to keep his face wholly serious. Dianna and Brienne both roll their eyes.

“One last walk on the grounds before we go?” Dianna asks her squire, clasping her hand in full view of everyone. Brienne’s face is soft in the dwindling firelight and the light of the sunset peeking through the cottage’s one window.

“Make sure to bring your sword,” Brienne says, only a smile accompanying her warning. They both watch them all but scamper out the door.

Jaime turns to her then and extends his hand. “Fancy a turn around the ‘grounds’ yourself, my lady?”

She keeps her smile and takes his hand.

They don’t walk far. Instead they bring a bottle with one inch of wine left in it and sit outside, backs against the wall of the house, watching the sun set. Jaime doesn’t get to take her on the riverbed, but the grass behind the place they’d called home for almost two moons is just as sweet.

* * *

When Jaime first sees King’s Landing in the distance, a handful of days later, it fills him with dread, but at least not nausea, this time. He’s woken for the third time under a thicket of trees, his arm wrapped around a sleeping Brienne without a care as to who would see.

When he sits up and looks out from the curtains of trees, Brienne stirs.

“What’s the matter?” she asks, turning to him, her eyes closed and her voice filled with sleep.

“Just the city,” he says, pulling the blanket up around her shoulders behind him. “Nothing we cannot handle.”

When do they ride into the city, everyone is caught up in celebration. Vendors sell wreaths of dried flowers. Men stagger around drunk on newly available vintages of wine. Children wave ribbons tied to the ends of wooden dowels in the air as they giggle and rave down step cobbled streets. The wedding is, as Brienne had predicted, two days away. Jaime remembers this day from his youth. He was not celebrating then. He had watched people laughing in the streets and smiled with his face while wanting to die inside. Poor lad. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

No one remembers where the ladder into the ground beneath the city lies, in that square where they found the apothecary and the red witch found them a horse-drawn cart. But Celia and Dianna know the tunnel that comes out in the Street of Silk. Dianna tucks her hair up, the teardrop visible on her neck, and suddenly she can play the part of the Whore with the Face of a Queen, leading three men in mail around a warren of alleyway brothels. A man sees them and whistles approvingly.

When at last no one’s looking, they lift up a barrel in a forgotten corner, and beneath it lies a trapdoor. “Whoever owns this brothel knows where his money comes from,” Dianna says with a laugh. “It’s still in the same place forty years later, just in case.”

They all descend into the earth. It is easier without a babe and a sense of foreboding.

The tunnels are dark. No priestesses appear to lead their way. Thank the gods Brienne has a good sense of direction—preternatural, like a very large and intimidating cat. She leads them as they stumble along against the damp stone and dirt.

Soon they encounter the same barrels, all in a row. No one came to move them. No one would, perhaps, until Cersei gets the idea to blow up the Great Sept where in a couple of days, in this time, she will marry a king and start down on a path of destruction.

At least, he reasons as he follows Brienne closely behind, the barrels mean they are getting closer.

When Brienne stops moving, he tenses. Does she sense danger? But she doesn’t: she has reached the end of the tunnel, a heavy wooden door.

“I think we’re here,” she says, quietly, in the voice she uses when she sees peril at every corner. “Stand back.”

She wrenches the door open. The hinges creak. A blast of cooler air hits them. This is it. They’ve reached the Keep.

It’s still maddeningly dark as Celia closes the door behind them.

“Where do you suppose we are?” he asks Brienne.

“I’m not sure. But I reckon we have a ways to go to get back to the entrance that took us here. That side is by the sea.”

“Well then,” Celia says, “onward, good sers.”

And so they are back to stumbling around in the dark. Crawling through strange small tunnels. Jaime hopes that between his daughter’s rebellious knowledge of the Keep’s secrets and Brienne’s inner compass that they end up in the right place, or close to it. Elsewise they will perish lost under the castle, leaving only bones for King Brandon to find. Perhaps he’d be all right with that. They’ve fulfilled his quest, after all. Perhaps he’s already found their bones and is waiting to see how they perish.

Dianna interrupts his reverie. “Fuck,” she whispers from the back of the pack.

They all turn. And they see what she sees: a glow of light approaching them down a side tunnel that the rest of they had already passed.

Jaime has seen this dance before. He doesn’t like it. “Keep going,” he urges. But it is too late. Whoever it is has taken notice of them and has picked up the pace as they advance.

“Who goes there?” a man says, in a familiar smooth voice that he makes only as loud as he needs to.

Celia charges at him with her sword drawn. Jaime rushes to stop her.

He doesn’t need to: she lifts the pommel of her sword and brings it down with great force onto Lord Varys’s head, and the fat bald man teeters to the ground.

Celia grabs his lantern before it can sputter out. She lifts it to survey his unconscious form. “I figured since you both knew him, this wouldn’t turn out to be fatal,” she says.

They leave Varys on the floor in the dark, and they proceed, onward. It is easier with the light. The Spider will have a nasty bruise to conceal at the wedding and an even nastier headache. Jaime smiles at the thought of him scouring the city with his little birds, trying in vain to find his attackers. Hopefully he won’t discover the tunnels that lead into a different time. Lord Varys, with the power of time travel at his disposal—it is a disquieting thought.

The wildfire barrels from their last visit are all gone. In their place, the imposing heads of all the Targaryen dragons. This is how he remembers this part of the Keep. The last time—the next time, technically—he set foot here, he’s with his siblings, feeling like he is descending into the deepest of the seven hells.

The tunnel they seek finally looms before them. The opening is large, but he knows the tunnel will be narrow. They all crouch down and begin to make their way back to the future.

* * *

Celia leads the way. Her light bobs, barely visible, at the head of their procession. Brienne is ahead of him, and he pushes himself along at the back of the group, bringing up the rear. She’s careful with each step forward, avoiding the bash of her head on the hard ceiling while also preventing herself from inadvertently kicking Jaime in the face. He holds back a dozen quips about Brienne’s backside, about the sight of her on her knees, about the sight of them both on the ground. This is neither the time nor the place, and her feet really are so close to his head.

Like on their initial trips through these passages, they follow the red thread. Dianna holds it in her hand triumphantly as they crawl along.

“I can’t say that I am not pleased with my foresight,” she says as they emerge into the same crossroads where they can finally stand. She’s lifting the thread where it attaches to the white yarn that he and Tyrion had wound through on their way here so many moons ago, to make the map of this place that he so far has not used once. The yarn is dingier now, and more frayed, but it hasn’t moved.

Dianna smiles, and begins tracing their steps back along the length of white string. Then the all the walls and the floors around them shake violently, a spray of stone coming down around their ears. Celia drops the lantern and cries out.

They are all in darkness. They call for each other. Dianna is uninjured, she assures them. Celia tries to locate her in the dark, and they exchange names until they find each other.

“Brienne?” he asks, holding down panic. He can’t tell where she might be and he didn’t hear her ask after Diana when he did.

“I’m over here,” she calls. “Are you hurt?” So far away. How did she get so far away? He crawls toward her, following the familiar scraping sounds of her armor against the stone. Is he hurt? If he is, it’s not too bad.

“No,” he calls back. “Are you?”

“Only a few bruises for tomorrow. Come to me and we’ll get everyone out of here. Just past these stones. Do you see them?”

He does. He pushes them away. He’s almost to Brienne. He can sense it. He can hear the sounds of her moving ahead.

Just in the distance, past another pile of newly fallen stone, a pinprick of light shines in the distance. Not a lantern, this time: an opening. Relief fills his chest. Home. Home, with all of them, and safe.

He stumbles over something soft and warm. His hand comes back wet. Blood.

“Dianna? Brienne?”

The person coughs, and he knows it is neither. Not Celia, either: they are dressed in rough wool rather than steel.

“Not here,” the person says. Their voice is young and smooth, though behind it is a wetness that Jaime recognizes all too well from the battlefield. They grasp his right wrist with a fine-boned hand.

“Ser Jaime,” the person says, laughing a painful laugh. “I knew it would be you.”

“You did? I’m afraid I don’t know you.” He feels for their wound with his good hand. There must be a lot of blood for it to have seeped through that wool.

“A pity,” the person says. “I’ve known you practically all my life. You taught me how to swing a sword. My father said it would be a waste to teach a girl anything aside from how to look well on a man’s arm. If he could see me now.”

Below them, the ground swayed and rumbled. Tiny stones fell into his hair.

“You can’t save me,” the person—the woman—says, resigned. “You need to get out of here. I don’t know what will happen when he finishes opening the tunnels. The black magic has driven him mad. I was meant to help him and got a hole in my belly for the trouble.”

He doesn’t know this woman, not yet, but he can’t just leave her here to die. He grabs her under the shoulders with his elbows and begins to pull her along behind him. The tunnels tremble again, violently, and he falls onto his back.

“And thus the world is created,” the woman whispers fervently in his ear. She wrenches herself off of him with a pained cry and shoves him back away from her. “Go,” she hisses. “Please. For them. For the Evenstar.”

The world around him shakes again, and he has no chance to quarrel. He is too busy outrunning the stones as they shake loose from the ceiling above. Someone is calling his name. Fervently. Over and over. He drops to his knees in the narrowest parts of the tunnel and tried to move toward the sounds. _Jaime! Jaime!_

 _For the Evenstar_ , she had said. Who did she mean? Brienne? Her father? He needs to get out of here. He doesn’t want to die under the stones or meet the Stranger in the depths of the Red Keep. He wants to live. For them.

He feels a pair of strong hands grip him under his arms in the dark. Then the walls shake again, and everything goes dark.

* * *

  
When he opens his eyes again, he is not underground. He is in a proper bed, with blankets and pillows. A fire burns in a hearth across the room. A torch sits lit in a sconce in the wall.

At the foot of the bed sits a man in a fur-trimmed cloak and a wheeled chair. He stares at Jaime and gives him a small, knowing smile.

“Welcome to the future,” says King Brandon Stark.


	9. The Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “ Do you feel small thinking of time, Ser Jaime?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Jaime begs for comments on his smut, Bran is all of us, and the journey ends, with a beginning.

_Welcome to the future_. Is the greeting ominous because of the words or because of who said them? Jaime isn’t sure.

“Which?” he asks the king. Brandon Stark. Whatever of His Name. “When.”

“There are many answers to your question. How do we measure the passing of the years?” The man has not moved at all. Not his head, not his eyes, not even his hands.He barely even moves his mouth. Jaime can’t imagine ever being so still.

“I could say 324 A.C.,” he continues. “That is the year that the maesters say we are in. But how long have humans walked the earth? Much longer than that. Millions of years. No one cares to measure time that way, except for me. It makes them feel small. Do you feel small thinking of time, Ser Jaime?”

His head is pounding. He nods it, though, because he cannot fathom what other sort of answer he should give.

“To give the answer you seek, Ser—you are back where you started your mission for me, only a few moons out.”

He feels his breathing slow at the words, but then his chest seizes again. “And the others?” Jaime asks. “Brienne, Dianna, Celia, the wounded woman...”

“Ser Brienne is resting; the maester set her broken bones after yours. Celia and Dianna are unharmed. You’re the worse off of the lot.” He cocks his head and looks at Jaime quizzically. “There was no other with you.”

“But she was there,” he says. “She was practically on top of me. She knew me. She said she always knew me, that I taught her to use a sword. Someone tried to kill her, but she bade me to leave her, for the Evenstar. Brienne’s father? Brienne? She said something about creating the world. I haven’t the slightest idea what she meant.”

The king closes his eyes briefly and nods his head. “I see.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Of course you do. Time is a funny thing. It changes us, but we cannot change it.” He smiles then. “I have waited elevenyears to see what happened to you, Ser Jaime.I was illustrating my father’s journey from Lyanna Stark’s deathbed. I had never gone to see the whole of it. What a surprise to find you there, not as a young man but how I last saw you, alongside Ser Brienne and the grown children of my small council. What a surprise to find the truth of who Jon really is. Still Aegon Targaryen, but not the one we always thought.”

“Will you tell him?”

“If he asks,” the king says. “But I suspectthat he will not. He lives free in the Land of Always Winter. He has spoken to none of us in Westeros for some time. His destiny is completed. Ours, however, is not.”

 _Ours_. Jaime looks away, then, the wheeled chair and the strange man in it too much to take in.

“Fascinating, what compels men to do what they do. Those red women—they saved you because of their love for their god. You came back here because of your love for the girl. Ser Brienne followed you, helped you, pulled you from that rubble because of her love for you. The fate of our whole existence resting on human emotions. The things we do for them.”

 _The things we do for love._ The words he once said, flippantly, cruelly, as he changed the course of their lives forever. Jaime swallows.

“You have given me much to think about, Ser Jaime,” the king says, pushing at the wheels of his chair to move toward the door. “As I have you, no doubt. Rest. We will speak again soon.”

Jaime lies his head back. The pounding returns, seeping in behind his eyes and around his ears. Between that and Brandon Stark’s words, he isn’t sure he’ll be able to rest at all.

* * *

  
The king does not return to Jaime’s rooms. A steady stream of other visitors do, though. Samwell Tarly, first, checking the tracking of his eyes, the bandages around his chest and around his hips. He’d screamed in pain being carried up the stairs, he learned, and Tarly suspected he cracked his hip bones and some ribs in addition to his head. 

“The only cure is rest, unfortunately. You’d get that for the blow to the head alone,” he says too cheerfully.

Tyrion is not cheerful, but full of wry mocking, which makes Jaime feel leagues better immediately. “ _Back soon?_ You could have said a little more. For all I knew those were your last words.”

“In my defense, I was in a hurry. You’re lucky I said anything at all.” Jaime pulls himself up to sitting, which he has found he can thankfully do on his own. “How are they? Dianna. And Brienne. Your king said she has broken bones.”

Tyrion raises his eyebrows. “That she does. A broken leg, a turned ankle, a turned wrist. Those last two are from dragging your sorry self through the reaches of time. Dianna’s with her right now. They’ve both been asking after you. Thank the gods you are hard to kill.” His smile twists a little as he says that. Jaime reaches out to take his hand.

“Thank the gods,” he says. “Can you take me to see her?”

“Our good maester says you are not to move. Which works out perfectly for me, because I must hear all about where you’ve been.”

“If you take a note to Brienne for me, I’ll tell you everything.”

Tyrion laughs. “You drive a hard bargain for a man who is trapped abed, brother.” But he brings him parchment and ink, and sits back smirking as Jaime writes.

> _My lady—_
> 
> _Apologies for the injuries. My head pounds but it remains on my shoulders, so thanks are in order. When I convince my jailers to free me from this bed you will be my first stop. Until then—_
> 
> _Jaime_

“Gods. _My lady._ ” Tyrion squints down at the parchment. “You are a sorry, sorry fool, and not just because of your atrocious penmanship. I mean, that woman has—“

“Do you want to hear the story or not?” Jaime asks him. His brother grins and saunters from the room.

Dianna brings the reply not thirty minutes later. She has a smirk on her face like her uncle’s, and thankfully only a small scrape on her chin from the ordeal that took place below.

“I’m faring well; thank you for asking,” she says with a laugh.

“I did ask,” he protests. “Everyone said you were unharmed.”

She hands him a rolled piece of parchment. “I know. I am glad to see you are awake.”

“Won’t you take me to see your mother? Or bring her to me? It will be an adventure.”

“Sorry,” she says. “But we really cannot move either of you just yet. It’s for your own good.”

Jaime sighs, and opens the note.

> _It cheers me to hear you are awake. The injuries are not so bad, and they were in the service of a noble cause. I will heal soon enough. I fear we share the same jailers. Perhaps they will free me first. In that case you will be my own first stop._
> 
> _Brienne_

“You two are quite embarrassing,” Dianna says, grinning. “The looks on your faces. Gods.”

* * *

Four days into their confinement, Jaime is confident that they are making everyone pay the price for keeping them abed. Each day, Jaime writes Brienne as soon as he wakes, sending Dianna or the maester or the maester’s wildling wife off to deliver his note.

 _Those rocks did not kill me, but boredom might_ , he writes. It’s short, but the day before he hadpassed over three longer notes he had written late in the night, unable to sleep, and his hand is still a bit sore. Those notes were more rambling and delirious, and probably impossibly difficult to make out in places. He doesn’t care, though; they are some of his finest work. _I miss your skin on mine_ , one began. He imagines Brienne turning red like a young girl upon reading that line and those that followed, and grins to himself.

After they depart with his messages, it is not long before someone—usually the same person who had come to check in on him first thing—returns with a note for him.

 _A true knight will not be felled by a foe so pathetic as boredom_ , she has written back. He bids his messenger —Dianna, today—to stay while he writes her again.

> _It occurs to me, my lady, that you have not yet responded to my longer missive, from yesterday._

“I have other things to do, you know,” she huffs as she hands him Brienne’s second reply.

> _I thank the gods that our daughter was not the one responsible for delivering it._

He chuckles. Dianna rolls her eyes and sits down in a chair to wait for him.

> _It did teach Tyrion the value of not reading others’ correspondence, I wager. I guess I will have touse my imagination to see what you thought of the things I described therein all alone. Here in my chambers. In my cold bed. A man lonesome and mournful._

Podrick Payne comes in during the afternoon with her response. Jaime smiles wide at the sight of him, though Podrick’s stoic demeanor doesn’t convey that he feels the same.

He wordlessly hands Jaime a rolled bit of parchment.

“Thank you, Ser,” he says. He nods at his sword. “That’s a lovely blade.”

Podrick shifts and looks at him with narrow eyes. “You can’t have it back,” he says, holding the pommel protectively.

Jaime shakes his head, still smiling. “I wouldn’t dream of asking.”

When Podrick leaves, stiffly saying goodbye, Jaime unrolls Brienne’s letter.

> _You are by yourself, but you do not dream of those things alone._

* * *

At last, Jaime is granted parole. Samwell Tarly comes in with a wheeled chair, not unlike the King’s, and servants set up a bath for him. 

“I’m to clean you up for a ceremony in the Throne Room,” he says. “Gilly is helping Ser Brienne do the same.”

Jaime gives Samwell no complaints and no japes as he sheds his clothes and allows himself to be lowered into the bath. He doesn’t even mind that the water is a bit too lukewarm. “What for?” Even if it was his execution, which is mostly certain by now that it is not, he’d still leap at the chance to be wheeled in front of Brienne.

The man beams. “The King is granting a knighthood to my Celia.”

“I cannot think of anyone more deserving,” he says.

Two clean-shaven Kingsguard lower him down the stairs in the Tower of the Hand using a system of ropes and pulleys hanging from the walls and ceiling. He hadn’t noticed them until now. Quite ingenious, this all was, though perhaps a bit slow and precarious. He hopes the king doesn’t ever grow too fat, or that could be the end of the reign of the Three-Eyed Raven.

“Careful,” he jokes to them. “Your Lord Commander will be most displeased if you drop me.”

The lads do not laugh. The displeasure of Ser Brienne of Tarth is quite a serious thing.

A small crowd has gathered in the throne room, all bathed in the bright light shining through the stained glass panes. He glimpses Samwell and his wife at the front, chatting with a strapping blond lad and a stocky short one—Celia had mentioned brothers, he thinks.

The knights roll him through the crowd, and then, finally: they come to a stop behind another wheeled chair and a crop of silver-blond hair.

“Lord Commander, Ser,” the man to his left says. Jaime will have to get their names, he thinks. Brienne turns around and fixes him in that piercing gaze of hers.

“Thank you,” she says with a small smile. “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”

“None at all,” says Ser To His Left.

“My lady,” Jaime says. “What a pleasant surprise to see you.”

“Yes, it’s almost like you were both specifically brought here to see each other,” Dianna says with a sigh. He didn’t even see her standing there. She comes behind him and pushes his chair alongside Brienne. He doesn’t hesitate to reach over and grab her hand and press his lips to her knuckles. Her face goes lightly pink, but he still doesn’t put her hand down. Are people watching them? _Good_ , he thinks.

“I haven’t had the chance to properly thank you,” he whispers, “for your noble deeds.” Her cheeks redden even further and she gazes down at their intertwined hands on her lap.

“Oh, look!” Dianna says loudly. “There’s Podrick and the king.”

Indeed, it is. Tyrion steps forward and announces all his titles, and then silence falls over the crowd.

“Lady Celia Tarly,” the king calls out. “For your service to the realm, your steadfast protection of the innocent and your liege Ser Brienne of Tarth, and your part in the success of the mission I put forth to Ser Jaime Lannister, I decree you shall be anointed a knight of the seven kingdoms. Please kneel.”

Jaime looks over at Brienne. He’s not the only one. Everyone is looking at them now; the room is abuzz with whispers. Brienne hardly notices. Her eyes shine and her smile wobbles as the king takes Podrick’s sword and places it on to Celia’s shoulder. He squeezes her hand.

“Well done,” he says. “Very well done.”

* * *

After the knighting ceremony, he almost makes a spectacle when they try to steer him and Brienne off to their separate wings of the castle. Almost. When he opens his mouth to object, she gives him such a dire look that he closes it again. 

“I’ll come to see you tomorrow,” she says, with a firm nod of her head. He kisses her hand again. A poor substitute.

“ _I miss your skin on mine_ ,” Tyrion whispers in his ear as her men roll Brienne away to bid Celia farewell.

Jaime pushes him lightly away. “Did you read the whole thing?”

His brother doesn’t even have the decency to look sorry or embarrassed. “It’s not my fault if you didn’t roll those scrolls up properly. I have to say, brother, I didn’t know you had it in you to put such things to paper.”

“I beg you to speak of something else,” Dianna says, covering her face in her hands.

Brienne, as always, is true to her word. The next day, the sun is barely out when she taps lightly on his door.

“You don’t need to knock,” he calls out. He knew it was her straight away; everyone else just barges in.

She’s propped up on two crutches, her leg still in a splint and her left wrist still bandaged. But her face is merry. He can’t help grinning.

“Good morning,” she says, as the door clicks shut behind her.

“It certainly is, now,” he replies, and she looks sheepishly at her feet.

“This room is rather high up,” she says. “I feel badly for asking everyone to run all those notes over.”

“Those notes were the only thing keeping me sane, so don’t apologize. Besides, a little exercise will do them all good.” He looks up at her from his place in his bed. She always had worried that men wouldn’t like having to crane their necks to see her, but he doesn’tmind. This view reminds him of everything he likes best about her: her strength, her determination, the uniqueness of her very being.

She shifts a little on her foot and it snaps him back to the moment. How many stairs has she had to climb to get here? He slides himself over on the bed and pats the warm space held behind. “I’m being rude,” he said. “You must be exhausted.”

“And this is the only seat you can offer, is it?”

He smiles. “It’s my preferred one.”

She lowers herself down to sit and places the crutches on the ground. She’s facing him, their legs touching lightly, and she’s close enough for him to touch her face. Her eyes fall closed.

“So what now?”

She shakes her head with a little laugh. Her hand has moved to his wrist. “I haven’t the slightest idea. Perhaps we should start with getting you a room on a lower floor.”

“I wouldn’t care which floor it was on as long as it was closer to you. In fact, perhaps we could just—“

“Jaime,” she admonishes. “That would be highly improper.”

“Kind of hard to talk about propriety when we’ve got proof of our liaison walking around on two legs.

“Not everyone is aware of that.”

He laughs. “Sure they are.” He tilts his head to catch her eye. “Brienne, think ofall the time that we have missed. Even when we got a second chance we wasted so much bloody time. Did you lie awake in that inn too, thinking of me on the other side of the wall? I know I did you. I don’t want to miss any more.”

She leans forward and kisses him then, holding his face between her palms.

That afternoon, Podrick and two young squires come to him and announce that he’s been assigned new quarters. “Not the White Sword Tower,” he says, “but much closer. On the second floor. The room isn’t as spacious, but—“

“I don’t mind,” he says quickly.

Podrick nods. “Good.” He pulls a pair of crutches from outside the door and thrusts them into Jaime’s hands. “Brienne wants you to try these out on the way over.”

* * *

“I found the girl,” King Bran says one afternoon. 

Jaime is in the training yard, leaning on his crutches, pushing his foot against a low wall to stretch his lower leg, as Brienne advised him to do. She is circling the practicing knights, giving advice on form and technique, despite not being able to join in herself. He’d scoffed when Tyrion suggested he do the same after his own injury. _You’re the Lord Commander—command!_ But it doesn’tbother her in the slightest, to be visibly out of commission.

He turns to face the king, who sits alone in his wheeled chair on the terrace behind him. He does have a habit of sneaking up on people and that hasn’t seems to have faded with time.

“From the tunnels, you mean? Is she all right?”

“That I do not know,” King Bran says. “But I found her. I believe she was one of the acolytes working under Grandmaester Munkin, during the reign of Aegon III. You know the story, of course.”

“Of course not,” Jaime scoffs, but the king is already smiling a bit, like he knew that. Which he did, probably.

“There was a lot of intrigue at court during that period. When is there not, I suppose. But the Grandmaester was particularly preoccupied with the regency of the young king Aegon. One of his more senior acolytes took the opportunity to try out some of the higher mysteries. He was interested in the nature of time, and if it would be possible to move freely within it. Not just to see the past, but to see the very fabric of time itself, to see how it was that the world was created.”

“And thus the world was created,” Jaime says, recalling the girl’s dying words in his ear.

“Precisely. A mantra of sorts for him. He conducted experiments with magic in the vowels of the Red Keep, hoping to prod at the nature of time. It seems one succeeded, though perhaps not in the way that he was expecting. It was his work that seems to have opened the tunnels. He was assisted by a younger acolyte in his experiments. At first I thought it was a man. But, alas, she revealed herself when she thought no one was looking.”

Jaime would prefer not to think about the implications of how Bran gathered his information. “She said that she knew me. In these experiments—did she travel to the future?”

“Why would she need to travel to the future to learn how to swing a sword from you?Anyone could have taught her, if she wished. No, I believe she came _from_ the future. She was very insistent on having the acolyte continue his work. It led him to distrust her and stick a dagger in her. Well, that and the voices he was starting to hear in his head. A most unfortunate tale.”

“She was on a quest. A quest from you.”

The king smiled again. Jaime did not like it.

“You said something interesting, in the past. The maesters and septas have too much power. I agree. Knowledge cannot be gated. If we lose access to our pasts, to the truths of our world, we cease to be truly human. These truths should be for everyone who wishes to know them, and even those who do not. Race, station, gender—these things should not determine who has knowledge.”

“And you mean for me to...teach the masses? It’s a noble goal, your grace, but I barely paid attention in my own lessons, truth be told.”

“‘Take one of our castles. Fill it with books. Start a Citadel for women.’ It’s an excellent idea. I wish I had thought of it.”

Jaime wonders how many of his private moments Bran has heard, or seen, or both. Hopefully he had the decency to look away when things did not concern him.

“Dianna is qualified, and ambitious,” the king continues. “And a highborn girl, with her parents as chaperones, well—many would feel very comfortable sending their daughters off to learn.”

“You want Dianna to start her own citadel,” Jaime says slowly. “And me to—chaperone?” _Yes, the honorable Kingslayer, back from the dead to watch over your daughters!_ He’d do well to keep out of sight instead.

“You would all serve at the pleasure of the king,” he says. “And perhaps you could lend your particular skills to the curriculum. Sword fighting. Battle strategy. Time travel, perhaps. If called upon. We have much to learn.”

The open-endedness of the statement chills him a bit. He will be called upon to send at least one student to her death. How many more? At least, though, there is one thing. “Does Dianna know yet? She’ll be thrilled.”

The king shook his head. “I will summon her and Ser Brienne today. There is the matter of legitimization, and Ser Brienne will have to make preparations to take her leave of the castle.”

“You seem very sure that she will want to come with us.”

“Of course she will. The girl in the past spoke of the Evenstar. We both know Dianna will choose Tarth, and that’s her home. I suppose Lord Selwyn will be relieved. He’s eighty-five years old now and nearly deaf, between you and me.”

Legitimized. On Tarth. The three of them. He thinks of the green island, steady on the horizon, as he sailed for Dorne. He’d not allowed himself even to dream of this, on the road; it left him feeling guiltier even than picturing a future that fixed everything except the circumstances that brought him the daughter he now had. “Why are you doing this? I don’t presume you mean to reward me. If anything, I still owe you a debt. I will always owe you a debt.”

“It’s not for you,” the King says. “It’s for the realm and all of mankind. I need them there, and they’ll be content to stay with you there. It’s far easier to get things done through love rather than fear.”

“Plus,” he adds, smirking, “I never said I was legitimizing her for House Lannister.”

* * *

Tyrion holds an impromptu dinner in his solar that night to celebrate.

“A toast! To the end of my decades-long deceit of you all, and to a new beginning for the Lady Dianna, now of Tarth, as her true birth shall dictate. Long may you—educate, and vex these two doddering old knights here.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jaime says, tapping his glass to Tyrion’s. “I’m now technically younger than both of you.”

Dianna is bursting with energy. Nestled between Samwell and his wife, she’s eagerly sketching out a map of the Citadel’s great library right there at the table among tureens of soup. They wouldn’t leave for at least a fortnight, if not longer, and any plans for libraries would be even farther in the future. But she cannot resist.

The other guests are more reserved. Brienneand Celia toast Dianna, smile at her excitement, converse politely over their meal. But their chatter is subdued, and Brienne’s smile slips easily into worry. As soon as the plates are cleared, they excuse themselves to retire for the night. Brienne smiles at him as she rises to embrace Dianna, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Jaime watches her take her leave of the room. Celia lingers a bit, Dianna’s hands clasped in hers. The sadness in her face, Jaime can understand. Celia is no longer pledged to Brienne, and this castle and its king had been her home and her duty her whole life. But Brienne’s—he hadn’t expected.

Tyrion catches him staring at the door, in the space where Brienne once stood. “ _Those little sounds you make_ ,” he whispered, “ _when I place my mouth on—_ “

“If you keep this up, your nose will come to regret it,” Jaime whispers back.

“Oh, just follow her, brother,” he says, settling back in his chair. “Do a dramatic reading of those letters and remind her why being dismissed from the Kingsguard today is really a blessing in disguise.”

He’s glad to hear someone else saw her mood too. “You think that’s it?” He hadn’t considered that she’d see it that way. It wasn’t meant as a slight. It was meant as a new phase in her service to the crown.

He shrugs. “Just my guess. But she’s your lady. Perhaps you know something I don’t.”

The journey to his lady’s chambers on crutches is as torturous as he’d imagined. Going down the stairs from Tyrion’s rooms leaves him winded and he has to rest againstthe bricks on the outside of the tower for a moment. Across the way he can see the White Sword tower, and a slight glow from the room at the top, a beacon in the purpling evening night.

He continues the last leg of the trip with a renewed vigor.

Brienne is not surprised to see him at her door. She’s dressed for bed, though, a robe drawn tightly over her chest.

“Apologies for disturbing you at this hour,” Jaime says with what he hopes is a beguiling smile. “But I do hope you’ll take pity on a weary traveler.”

She shakes her head and opens the door to let him in. A small fire is burning in the hearth, despite the warming summer air. An old habit, perhaps.

She moves across the room with such grace, even propped up on crutches to take the weight off her broken leg. He has to propel himself using light taps of both his feet together, to keep the weight off his hips, andthat’s on top of using his elbow instead of hand to hold himself up. He imagines that he looks not unlike the seal pups he’d seen flopping around the shorelines near Casterly Rock.

She pulls a chair out for him in front of the fire, and sits down next to him.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any wine, or I’d offer you a drink.”

“I thought of bringing something, but getting here was complicated enough in my state,” he says, lightly.

“I’m sorry to have left so abruptly. I have much to do and thought it best to prepare for an early start.”

“And much on your mind, it seemed.” He reached across for her hand, entwining his fingers with hers. “Tyrion said Bran dismissed you from the Kingsguard. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize he would do it quite like that.”

“He didn’t, exactly. And it’s a great thing. For Dianna, for you, for all of us. I’m glad of it. It’s just...sudden. It’s not the easiest way. It’s not how I would have chosen to do this. I have to write to my father tomorrow to let him know. Where do I even begin?”

“You said he was happy when you came home before,” he says. He almost says married, but that wasn’t a part of the king’s orders. “Why would this be any different? You’re bringing a notorious cripple with you, true, but that’s on the king’s command. And you’re bringing a fully grown heir, too. He will be pleased.”

“You know that’s not—that doesn’t bother me. I’ve been lying to him. Lying about the heir for twenty years. Even the one time that they met.” She looks away from him, into the fire.

“She forgave you for that. Your father will too.” He squeezes her hand to get her attention. “I want also, to say that I won’t hold you to anything, once we get there. As much as I’d like to. The king means to send us to help Dianna, and I will do my duty as you will do yours. The rest can be your choice.”

She turns to him and clasps his hand in both of hers. “I did choose you, long ago,” she says. “Tarth is my duty, but so is my family. And that goes just beyond my father and our daughter. It extends to you, too.”

There is a twinge of pain in his hip as he lunges forward to kiss her, then. But he ignores it. The feel of her soft hair beneath his fingers is balm enough.

“It would be very poor manners to force an injured man such as me to travel back to my chambers at this hour,” he says as they break apart.

She raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think either of us are in the right shape for...well, that. Yet.”

He strokes his finger down her long, pale neck. “I do have a few uninjured parts of my body,” he reminds her. He leans closer, his mouth next to her ear. “ _And I miss your skin on mine._ ”

She leads him to the bed, and he doesn’t need to miss it much longer.

* * *

  
They don’t have many belongings to load on their ship to Tarth, when the day comes. Most of the cargo belongs to Dianna’s book collection, newly expanded with a few volumes from Samwell Tarly.

The maester and his family are at the forefront of the retinue to wish them on their way. He’s unabashedly crying; his wife sweetly hands him a handkerchief, her own face dry. A few days after the announcement, about Dianna’s new titles, Celia swore her sword to her in court for all to see. He hadn’t been there—he was out in the yard, trying to build up strength in his legs, per his Lord Commander’s orders—but he heard it was quite dramatic.

It’s harder than he thought, saying goodbye to his brother. They spent some of their remaining days in the city, drinking and talking of everything and nothing at all. Tarth isn’t a far distance from the capital. He could visit easily, when there is time. But there is always very little time.

“You’re going to have to handle all this without my expert hand to guide you,” Tyrion says, his voice heavier than his words would indicate. “But do feel free to write for my advice whenever you need it.”

“I’m sure I won’t need it,” Jaime replies, embracing him, “but I’ll write you regardless.”

Podrick and Brienne are having their own tense goodbye, a little way down the dock. He pats Jaime brusquely on the arm when they finally join him. Jaime nods at him. He will lead the Kingsguard now, in Brienne’s stead. He already looks the part.

The king surprises him. He reaches out to shake his hand, a knowing smile on his lips. “Until we meet again,” he says.

He feels the words settle over him in a cool chill. If only he could put those adventures in time behind him like he will this city. But they will happen. They already have.

The four of them take their leave of the little group and climb on board. It’s a cloudless day; on the horizon, it will be difficult to tell where the sky ends and the sea begins. A little girl waves to him from the front of the ship, the child of the galley cook.

“Perhaps she can become one of our pupils,” Dianna whispers excitedly. He will dread each child he has to teach, a little, wondering if she will be the one to die in front of him in those tunnels. At least they will be able to prepare her well, whoever she is.

Brienne leans against the ship’s railing, stray hairs blowing around her facein the breeze. On her island, he will properly woo her. Take her for walks on the beach. Write her more letters of longing. Ask her father for her hand.

 _I never do things the proper way_ , he thinks, as the anchor drops and the ship starts to push away from land. But neither does she.

 _Fate_. He steps up to wrap his arm around her waist, and they both watch the sea ebb around them. _What else could it be?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for following alone for the ride. I especially was grateful for the readers and the kind words these last few days that encouraged me to wrap up these last few scenes. As I’ve said elsewhere, I started writing fic again late last year not only because of a renewed interest in this particular world, but also because I’d had some disappointments in getting original work published. It’s been lovely to find a supportive community here of readers and creators, and it’s reminded me of the joy of writing. So thank you all—hope to see you around these parts again soon!


End file.
